


Speak, Friend, and Enter

by ashen_key



Category: Avatar (2009)
Genre: Bisexual Character, Canon Character of Color, F/M, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-01-07
Updated: 2011-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-14 13:10:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/149546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashen_key/pseuds/ashen_key
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Information Technician Norm Spellman (US Navy) first met Lance Corporal Trudy Chacon (USMC) on a ship in 2134. After the next twenty years, they become friends, lovers and, when Doctor Spellman and Captain Chacon are reunited on Pandora, rebels. This follows their journey from that first meeting to the Battle of the Tree of Souls...and after.</p><p> </p><p>[On hiatus]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

_February, 2127  
Washington Metropolitan Area, USA_

The window-seat is Norm's favourite part of the entire Spellman apartment. The kitchen is the next favourite, but this is pretty normal. Kitchens are where the family actually _live_ , as opposed to the so-called living room, which is normally relegated to tv room and bedroom and the room where you entertain guests that you don't actually like. But the kitchen is often full of people; neighbours, his mother's friends, his mother's students who try not to try too hard to impress her. He likes people, likes watching them and listening to them and talking with them, but they can be exhausting. Particularly when it is his mother's post-grad students and fellow professors. Particularly for the last month, since the latest report from Pandora.

The reason for this is that his mother seems to take Pandora's biota as a personal insult. On more than one occasion, Norm has thought that if he hears anyone else argue about the function of Pandoran bioluminescence, or allude to the Cambrian Explosion to explain different body-plans, or debate whether the Na'vi are symbiotic parasites from another planet, he is going to kill someone. Even if Professor Eugenie Spellman is an evolutionary biologist, her ire at Pandora's apparent lack of 'genuine originality' seems somewhat excessive.

Tonight, as soon as he could and as usual, he excused himself from the table and retreated to the living room, book in hand. An actual _paper_ book, with pages he had to turn instead of a pixelated button he had to click. A book with weight in his hands and its own, distinctively bookish smell. He loves books. He lives in an apartment full of them – bookshelves covering all the walls, even the hallway from the front door right through to the living room at the other end of his home – and he loves them. His favourite thing to do is take a book, be it paper or electronic, and fit himself on the window-seat, and read there by the light of the metropolis. If he sits one way, he can peer up and catch sight of the lattice of bridges above; if he sits another, he can watch the sidewalk two floors down; and if he sits yet a third way, and looks very hard, and at a certain angle, some days he can even see all the way down to the ground-level road, twelve stories below. He's still short enough that he can sit sideways in the window, back against one side with his foot braced against the other. Which is exactly what he does, tuning out the conversation drifting through the apartment.

(“Eugenie, you keep forgetting about convergent evolution-”

“And you keep using that phrase. I don't think you know what it means,” Norm's mother observes drily as the rest of them laugh.)

He has more important things to worry about.

 _"Well, here we are at last! ' said Gandalf. "Here the Elven-way from Hollin ended. Holly was the token of the people of that land, and they planted it here to mark the end of their domain; for the West-door was made chiefly for their use in their traffic with the Lords of Moria. Those were happier days, when there was still close friendship at times between folk of different race, even between Dwarves and Elves."  
"It was not the fault of the Dwarves that the friendship waned," said Gimli.  
"I have not heard that it was the fault of the Elves," said Legolas.  
"I have heard both," said Gandalf; 'and I will not give judgement now. But I beg you two, Legolas and Gimli, at least to be friends, and to help me. I need you both. The doors are shut and hidden, and the sooner we find them the better. Night is at hand!"_

It takes a tense couple of pages for the doors to be found, but there are problems with not even Gandalf knowing the password to open them. “Good,” Norm tells the book – Gandalf has been more than a little aggravating to the boy. A know-it-all, like so many professors he knows through his mother. _And_ a know-it-all who bristles at Pippin, who is so far Norm's favourite character. And there are wolves howling and he can't remember if they have another way to go or not (he's pretty sure it was either under through the Mines or over that impassable mountain pass), and so he keeps reading hurriedly.

 _"I was wrong after all," said Gandalf, 'and Gimli too. Merry, of all people, was on the right track. The opening word was inscribed on the archway all the time! The translation should have been: Say "Friend" and enter. I had only to speak the Elvish word for friend and the doors opened. Quite simple. Too simple for a learned lore-master in these suspicious days. Those were happier times. Now let us go!"_

Norm stops, and stares at the page. Suddenly frowning, he rereads the last couple of pages.

Speak.

Say.

In Elvish, they...are the same?

Norm stares out into space, frowning and thinking quickly, ignoring the dramatic plight of Frodo being seized by a something. In English, obviously, _speak_ and _say_ are different, and it's the same in Russian ('сказать' and 'говорить'). Marking his page, Norm gets up and quickly makes his way to his room. Finding his reader, he turns it on and quickly goes to the Spanish dictionary supplied by school.

 _ **say** (vt) decir, hablar.  
 **speak** (vt, vi) hablar; decir; conversar; pronunciar. _

Interesting. At first, he just wonders how on Earth someone would translate the mistranslation into Spanish. But then other issues started to form. He's already well aware that he can say some things in Russian than he can't say in English, and vice versa. But he'd never really _thought_ about the differences language could make before.

In _The Fellowship of the Ring_ , it was a momentary plot point, albeit an important one. Speak, friend. Say friend. It matters to characters, but the implications are contained by the fact that they are made-up. And he knows what happens in the real world, mistranslation and a lot of well-paid translators. As his grandfather is fond of telling him, translations can either be beautiful or faithful, but rarely both.

(Of course, his grandfather _also_ usually adds, 'translations are like women that way', which strikes Norm as just a bizarre concept to hold.)

But that's not what he is thinking about because he is, abruptly, aware that he is thinking in English. Which he doesn't always. Sometimes, it's just English, sometimes just Russian, and other times, it's this odd mix of both that any telepath would have to be exceedingly bilingual to understand. And when he's learning Spanish, or trying to get a handle on Mandarin, it helps if he starts to think in those languages, instead of English and then translating. But it's not just a question of languages and different words. Logically, the language would _shape_ those thoughts, wouldn't it? A bit. Maybe.

Speak, friend.

Say friend.

“-used the same words on two different continents,” he hears from the kitchen, courtesy of his brain tuning his ears back to the conversation next door.

“Oh, for-”

Another person – Madison, he thinks – says, incredulously, “What, the same words?”

“Yes, they used the exact same words. Exact grammar and-”

“Bull. Shit,” says the person (male, older, Dr Vertov?) who said the 'oh, for'. “It has to be a colony of the other. And the distance is far too great for any communication between the two, there have to be dialect words.”

“Jesus,” Norm's mother says. “If they have evolved some form of planet-wide communication system, can't they have been decent enough _not_ to have oral language, too? Ugh. The aliens on Europa make _far_ more sense.”

“But they are not nearly as interesting, my dear,” Vertov says, in an apparent change of direction. “We don't argue nearly so much over your beloved squid- ah, young Vasily!” At the doorway, Norm flushes at the use of his middle name. (Seriously: Norman Vasily. He has _no_ idea what his otherwise fairly – for an academic – sensible mother was thinking. His older sister Tash has far more normal name of Natalia Anne. Maybe his mother got inexplicably more fond of her Russian heritage in the eleven years between her children.)

“I, uh, overheard-”

“Impossible not to in this tiny apartment,” Vertov says, to derisive snorts from the rest of the table. At three rooms plus a bathroom, the Spellman apartment is practically a mansion. Norm's flush gets worse.

“The Na'vi only have one language?”

“It's an hypothesis. Not _quite_ a theory yet.” Enrique says. “But that's what the evidence suggests.”

“Scanty evidence,” Eugenie says, watching her son. “Humans have only been on Pandora, what, twenty-four, twenty-five years. The RDA haven't even finished setting up their colony yet. We haven't been poking around the place _nearly_ long enough to have any real idea what's going on. I- Oh, do sit down, Norm. You're allowed to join the grown-ups.”

“Absolutely!” Madison says with a beam. “We can corrupt you!” She glances at Eugenie, and has the grace to look a little shifty. “I, mean, uh.”

“Ah-huh,” Professor Spellman says, eyeing her student with aloof amusement as Norm squeezes in on the bench. “No corrupting of offspring just yet.”

“What kind of language is it?” Norm asks, uncomfortably aware of his awkward elbows and limbs. “I mean, um, I know humans can learn it, but does it have any similarities to any human language, or, uh?”

“Hard to tell with what little the fuck, I mean, freak. _Freaking_ RDA will release,” Madison says, “but from what we can tell, it's _similar_ in sound to some Polynesian languages, and it has some other elements from other languages from around Earth, but in combination it's all unique.”

“Not to mention it's probable that there are words and meanings that can only be understood when spoken in conjunction with movement of the ears and tail,” Ayesha adds. “Which is why the Avatar Program is so important-”

“And yet immoral,” Vertov says darkly. “That man should never been allowed to _study_ , let alone be given free reign in a laboratory like that.”

“Dr Lovecraft?” Norm asks, eyes flicking around the group.

“May he be struck down with failure and lack of tenure,” his mother says. “If he wants to go and play at being Dr Frankenstein, he can go and _write_ a damn novel. Or join a special effects team.” The conversation rapidly distracts itself with questions of ethics, bioengineering and the differences between Earth's DNA and just what Pandora's lifeforms use, before heading back to language, and communication, and different modes thereof.

For the first time, Norm stays for every single word.

It won't be the last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contained quotes from _The Fellowship of the Ring_ , by JRR Tolkien.


	2. Providence and Stardust

_**Earth**  
September, 2134  
Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean_

 

Everyone gets lost on the _USS Providence_. Everyone. From the new transfers to the apprentices on their first ship to Captain Kedar herself. One grey passageway crosses with another, and another, and yet another. Norm himself often likens it to trying negotiate a dwarven city, but only in his head. His own sense of direction copes with it just fine, but add an extra battalion of combat-weary Marines to the ship, and the chaos of life on-board magnifies.

By now, all the _Providence_ 's crew have gotten used to stumbling across figures dressed in worn fatigues, standing in the crossways in various states of confusion. So, Norm is not surprised when he does exactly this. The Marine is even thoughtful enough to give him warning, thanks to a string of muttered, polylingual curse words that echo down the corridors. What _does_ surprise him is the Marine's height; she'd (the voice is his only clue, given regulation uniform, regulation crew-cut, his view entirely of her back) barely come up to his shoulder.

“Lost?”

She turns, and flashes him a crooked grin. “Yeah?” she drawls with a laugh. “What was your first clue?” Her words are also a variant on prior experience, but her laugh and grin make him grin quickly back.

“Sixth sense.”

“Sure.”

“Practice.”

“I was obvious, wasn't I?”

“...a little,” he admits with another quick smile.

“Damn. There goes my street-cred.” She sounds entirely cheerful about this. “Mind at least tellin' me where the hell the mess-hall is?”

“I can show you.” Her eyes narrow slightly at him, so he hurries to add, “I'm going there myself.”

“Okay,” she says, rolling a shoulder back and deciding to take him at his word. Then again, leading in person is less likely to lead to pranked wrong directions than verbal instruction. Norm had learned that well over the past eight months.

“It's easy to get lost,” he continues as they fall into step. “But there is a system to it all. Every p-way, and sets of stairs, and each room and cubby hole in the ship is numbered and letter based on how far away it is from the hangar deck. Whether it's going up or down, starboard and port and fore and aft.”

She – Lance-Corporal from her insignia, Chacon from the name-tag across her breast – glances up at him.

“P-way?”

“Passageway.”

“Got it.”

The silence that falls is comfortable, which is unnerving in of itself. Well, not _silence_ -silence; normally a home to nearly two thousand personnel, now the _Providence_ is carrying well over three thousand, and has all the sound to prove it. Not that ships are ever silent, unless they are on the bottom of the ocean, and probably not even then. But he means the silence between him and the Marine. The girl. She can't be much older than him, if indeed she is. _Pretty_ girl.

But he'd noticed that as soon as Chacon had grinned at him.

He shouldn't have. And normally he doesn't notice beyond the academic. But her grin was vibrant and fierce and lit up her face, which itself was a phrase that hadn't made any sense until just now. And now his thoughts are spiralling just fast enough that comfortable has shifted to awkward on his part.

“So, uh, how you finding the _Providence?_ ”

“Interesting,” Chacon replies, stumbling as the ship rolls underneath her feet and grabbing the handrail at the stairs. He has his hands up, but doesn't step forward to catch her – it'd be patronising if she didn't need assistance, and everyone had learnt the hard way that the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines are still combat-weary and combat-shocked, with reflexes that tended to hit first and ask questions later, if it all. Which is why command have shoved them onto a ship to calm down for a few weeks before being let loose on society. It makes sense, it just makes life more... interesting than it strictly speaking has to be. “I mean it's weird the way the whole thing moves? But space-wise, it ain't worse than livin' back in New Jersey. 'Sides,” she adds as she scrambles up the ladder-like stairs, “no one's shooting at me. It's a damn vacation.”

There isn't much he can think to say to that (and anyway, he is trying desperately not to look at her ass as he climbs up because, really, you don't _do_ that while on active duty) besides, “Oh. Right, sure, that makes sense.”

Which makes her laugh and here's the thing: her laugh isn't husky or breathy or wicked-girl-giggle, it's a _cackle_ like she's a witch with a cauldron somewhere, and it's the sexiest damn sound he's ever heard. It's the kind of laugh that invites someone to join in the joke.

“Don't worry 'bout it. Mess-hall just up ahe- Hey, Eddie!” One of the Marines further down the corridor turns and waves. “Okay, uh, Spellman, wasn't it?”

“-Yep.”

“Right.” Chacon flashes him a smile. “Nice to meet you, Spellman. And thanks.” With that, she jogs down the corridor and cheerfully knocks into the Marine Eddie, leaving Norm to follow on his own. This probably isn't a bad thing, he reflects. It saves them from the awkward we-were-talking-but-now-do-we-still-continue dance that he hates, and in any case, he's a little too distracted to be of much conversational use.

– –

Here's what normally happens when he meets a pretty girl, particularly a pretty girl while he's on active duty; he looks, he takes note, and he dismisses because he doesn't have the time, or he can't think of anything to say, or she's entirely out of his league (whatever his league might actually be: he's far better at knowing which girls are out of it rather than which ones are in), or because he is, in fact, on active duty. Particularly the latter, because this means being on a ship somewhere on the ocean, which in turn means all the possessors of two X chromosomes and slash or a feminine identity are wearing uniform and he is going to have to work with them for the duration of their mutual assignment.

Norm doesn't even find it particularly difficult not to ponder in-depth – nineteen or no, he's just far too busy. Twelve-hour days are standard, four hours to stand watch and all the others to complete his other tasks, and then usually some time devoted to catching up on his reading. Those other tasks currently involve fixing the _Providence's_ still damaged computer systems. Which involves coding and debugging and rewriting programs and dragging over the toolbox and taking off panels of the ship so he and the others in his team can see how good hotwiring does.

He has to frequently remind himself that if they'd caught the edge of an _actual_ bomb, rather than the blast of an electric one, they would have had far more pressing concerns than the computers being unable to consistently talk to each other. Like, say, for instance, being pieces of floating wreckage. Sometimes that helps more than others, and he often falls asleep to images of holographic screens and symbols and flashing messages of 'CANNOT CONNECT' and 'DOES NOT RECOGNIZE'.

But still, he sees her around.

It's as if that one conversation has entered her into his personal radar, and that radar can't help but ping every time she enters his sphere of awareness. She's there, lounging on the deck with her company, their pants rolled up to the knee and flashing legs scratched, burned, scared; legs belonging to people who have far more important things to think about than razors. Unless it's razor-wire, now that, that they care about. He sees her in the mess-hall, in one of the common rooms cleaning her rifle; he sees her being shouted at by her sergeant-major, who is making her battalion run around the ship. Up and down and over stairs and from one deck to another to loop back again the bellows of DON'T STOP, YOU BUNCH OF PAMPERED PUSSIES, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU COMPLAIN' ABOUT.

Those are the times Norm is damn glad he's in the Navy, not the Marine Corps. Even if Chacon makes running look good.

On the other hand, of _course_ he sees Chacon around. They are stuck on a ship in the middle of the ocean; after a while, you see _everyone_ around, even when you'd rather not. It's just because he knows (read) her name that she's shifted from being cargo to being a person, that is all.

 _Right, Spellman, if that's the case, why are you always disappointed that she's always surrounded by people?_

He rarely has a good answer to that.

– –

The advantage of Mid Watch is this: afterwards, he can walk outside, onto the main deck, and tip his head back to look at the stars as he takes a deep breath of fresh air.

 _Stars._

 _Fresh air._

It's this, more than the increased chance of _not_ having to kill anyone, that led him to the Navy in the first place. Months and months on ships which, along with all the annoyances, have the promise of clear skies in the middle of the ocean. A chance to get _away_ from the claustrophobic, urban sprawl and be able to _breathe_ without a filter-mask.

Tonight, though, he can also taste cigarette smoke. Normally, he'd ignore it, but with the smoke comes a voice.

“Hey there, Spellman.”

He turns, frowning. Chacon is sitting on the deck, back against the wall, arm resting on a propped up knee. He can see the glow of her cigarette more clearly than her face, but it only takes a moment to recognise the roughened sound of her voice.

“Evening,” he says, even though it's after 0200. “I, uh. Didn't know you smoked.”

“Filthy habit,” she admits cheerfully. “But hell, it ain't like it's gonna damage anythin' more than they are fucked up already. You don't?” she adds.

“No.”

“Ah. Sorry.” The glow abruptly goes out.

“You didn't have to-”

“Filthy habit,” Chacon repeats, and he can hear the smile in her voice. “Y'like the stars, too?”

“Try to see them whenever I can,” he says, not entirely sure why. He could have just said 'yes'. But for some reason, Chacon doesn't really invite a simple 'yes'.

“Never saw 'em 'til I was shipped out,” she says. “I mean, there are images from last century and all that, 'bout the night sky. And images they take on the Moon and Mars. But it's...it's different, actually seeing them. We're lookin' into the past when we look at the night sky, you know?”

“I. Huh,” he says, moving over to sit next to her. “I never thought of it like that,” he says slowly, after a long moment of staring at the sky.

“Most people don't,” Chacon says, and he can still hear that smile. “But I mean, we're just seein' the stars as they were when the light left them. Half of them might actually be dead, been dead for centuries, but because we can't _see it_ , we've got no idea.”

“...I think you're hurting my brain a bit,” he admits at last, and then grins as she bursts out laughing.

“Oops,” she says, not sounding at all apologetic. “Poor brain.” She reaches out to pat his head, and Norm goes still, lets her, doesn't move away. It's just a quick touch, and he's seen her around and interacting with the other Marines. Personal space what personal space seems to be the way they roll. But that's in their pack, all rough and tumble like giant puppies. This is different, far more deliberate. He wonders if she's flirting, and then wonders if it's just his own ridiculous hormones skewing reality on him.

“I'll live,” Norm says, grateful for the darkness and the way it hides the burning on his cheeks.

“Seein' as we didn't formally introduce ourselves before, I'm Chacon. Lance Corporal Gertrude Chacon, but please don't call me Gertrude, ever. Or Gertie. It's Trudy.”

“Nice to meet you, Lance Corporal Trudy Chacon,” he says, getting another quick smile. “Seaman Apprentice Norman Spellman. But, likewise, it's always Norm.”

“Norm. Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too.” He's prepared for the conversation to dovetail in awkward silence, but she surprises him by continuing.

“'Course, the other thing about stars is we're made up of them.”

“We are stardust.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, it's cliché,” she says, tone somewhere between wry and resigned. “But it's true. All the atoms in our body, either from the the Big Bang or, most of 'em, from the deaths of stars. Atoms of your left hand different from the ones in your right.”

A little off-balance, he says,“Could say that's morbid.”

“Oh?”

“We're made up of _dead_ stars,” Norm says, stressing the operative word. She dismisses that with a flick of her hand.

“Atoms themselves ain't exactly dead. Can't be. They ain't alive to start with.” Chacon shrugs. “I think it's neat, myself. We're made up things that have been stars and planets and galaxies. Connects us to everything.” Without meaning to, he remembers the locket at the base of her throat, the one with the little black cross on it. “Shame, though, not many folk get to look up and see them. Stars, I mean.”

“Yeah, I...” _can't think of anything to say_.

“....and now you're probably wonderin' how to get out of this conversation,” she says, awkwardly.

“No,” Norm says, sharply. “Not at all. I just, uh.”

“What?” Her voice is wary.

“It's been a while since I heard anyone really talk about things like stars and atoms and the universe. Just took me by surprise.”

Cautious, “Y'sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Yeah, well. Might be safer if you chose the topic of conversation. I'm outta practice at pretendin' to be normal.”

“Nothing wrong with not being normal,” Norm says, and sees the flash of her teeth as she smiles at him. “So, uh. Why did you enlist?” he asks, at a loss himself. He'd rather go back to talking about stars. Normal small talk is somewhat beyond him, too, and he doesn't even have the excuse of a long tour of duty in a warzone.

“Couldn't afford to go to college,” she says, a little shortly. “And I was broke. Was actually gonna be Air Force, but only had enough money to get to the Marine recruitin' place.” Beat. “I'd appreciate it if you didn't go 'round tellin' people that last bit.”

“Yeah, I won't.” Her comrades wouldn't let her hear the end of it, rivalry and scorn being alive and well between the military branches. “Why Air Force?”

“I've been flying choppers since I was fourteen. I love it. But figured Marines won't be too bad. Do my four years, use the GI Bill...” Her voice trails off.

“And then what happened?”

“Huh?”

He shrugs. “Just, way you said it. Sounds like you changed your mind.”

There is silence, and Chacon huffs a laugh. “Maybe I did. I can't.” She pauses, thinking. “It's home, now. This. The Marines, the military. It's...there is somethin' really liberating about, well, uh, surrendering, I guess you'd say. To something bigger than yourself. Something with rules. Not bombarded by buy this, buy that, if you don't look like a movie star you're never gonna get laid. All this _choice_. Constantly. You're free from all that.”

“America's Spartans,” Norm says, a little sardonic.

“Exactly,” she says, perfectly serious. “Still, wouldn't mind bein' a pilot,” she admits. “God, I miss flying.”

“Quickest way would be Naval Academy.”

“Oh, yeah, I know. But then I'd be a freaking _officer_. A class-traitor.” He nods, slowly, and gets her laugh again. “Joking. I'm not that much of a socialist, I swear.”

“No, no. I get it. I'm enlisted, too, remember?”

“Yeah. Nice boy like you, with an accent like that? What happened, you get dumped and decide to run off to the military or something?”

“Well...”

“...fuck, seriously?” She cackles. “Oh, man. Let me guess, for the football captain?”

“No. Worse. Captain of the debating team. It's okay, you can laugh.”

“Oh, god. That's terrible. I shouldn't laugh. 'Specially as _I_ got dumped for the football captain,” Chacon says, giggling.

“It wasn't _only_ because of that,” Norm says, attempting for dignity and falling far short.

“Ah-huh.”

“I'm serious.”

“Sure,” and then she laughs again. “Yeah, I know. It's rarely simple.”

“I didn't know what I was doing. And the financial assistance would be really useful. Figured it couldn't hurt.”

“Makes sense.”

“...and, sure, there was a little bit because Keyna. A _little_ ,” he stresses. He sees the flash of her teeth again.

“Knew it. Where she end up?”

“Think she ran off to Harvard. Economics.”

“See, boring. Way more boring than joining the Navy and doin'...whatever you're planning to do next.”

“Might even stay.” He can feel her studying him, even in the dark.

“Doubt it,” she says at last. “You don't seem like a lifer.”

He doesn't have to ask her to clarify. “I, uh. I should be getting back, though. Get some sleep.”

“Yeah, I should do the same.” Neither of them move, then both of them do. They stop, and she snorts a laugh. “After you, Spellman.”

“Going. Night, Chacon.”

“Night.”

It takes him ten meters down the corridor to work out she's stayed out on the deck. Probably, he thinks, with her head tilted back, watching the stars.


	3. Lord of the Rings

He can't decide if it's good luck that he bumps into Lance Corporal Trudy Chacon in the ship's library a couple days later, or bad. It's bad because he hasn't really decided what he makes of that last conversation they had. His mind has been providing alternating explanations for every word and every nuance in her voice ever since. And his voice, and what _he_ said, too, because infatuation has always been cruel to those with over-analytical minds. And infatuation it is, he thinks. Only thing that makes sense given, even after that awkwardness, he wants to go and talk to her again. _And_ it's bad luck he bumps into her again because as he walks in and sees her reading at the table, all alone again, his awareness shifts into overdrive. His awareness of how much space he takes up (sure, he's not a giant, but at six foot two he's still pushing the upper limits of what is deemed acceptable to be working on a ship) and an awareness of all the things he's _going_ to say, and not say, and _could_ say now that she's by herself again, and what he said before, and stumble over saying now.

It's good luck because she looks up at his footsteps, and smiles, and says, “Oh, hey,” in a way that suggests she's actually happy to see him. He's pretty sure that her smile, and the tone of her voice, are going to engrave themselves into his memory, and Norm has more than enough self-awareness to think, _yeah, I'm in trouble_. But he smiles back and answers, “Hey. Didn't expect to see you here.”

Chacon raises her eyebrows slightly, but she's still smiling. “Yeah, well. My copy of _Lord of the Rings_ got completely busted during a pulse bomb. I'm borrowing.”

“Like a pirate?”

There is a beat of silence, and her smile deepens into a smirk on one side, dimple flashing into view. “I'm gonna plead the Fifth on that one.”

“Fair,” Norm says, shifting slightly awkwardly in the doorway. “Having fun with the locks?”

“One way of putting it.”

“I could help,” he offers without thinking about it. “I, uh. Work the computers here.”

“Oooh.” Instantly, her guard melts away. “So you're like a wizard. Outstanding. Please,” she says, gesturing to the table and offering him her reader all in one movement, “pirate away.”

Norm sits down, taking the reader off her. It's battered and scratched, he presumes from living in her backpack through a war. Not that he really thinks about the war bit – he suspects that walking around wondering how many people the Marines had killed would be impolite at best, morbidly rude at worst. He certainly doesn't want to imagine the pretty girl sitting next to him killing anyone.

Still, he hesitates. “I'd take it as a favour,” he says, fingers paused in the midst of working the controls, “if you didn't mention this.”

She crinkles her nose and laughs a bit, sounding more like a witch than ever. An apprentice witch, giggling over frogs' legs and eyes of newt and giving the boy who pulled her braids itches in uncomfortable places. “Puh- _lease_ ,” she says. “Give me some credit here. We're just doin' a bit of requisitioning.”

That gets a soft, answering laugh. “Okay,” he says, and then he frowns a bit. “You rebuilt the systems?”

Chacon nods, her mouth pulling to the side again. Not exactly a smirk this time. “Yep. A lot of things got wiped, so I had to manually rewire shit to get it to work as well as recode things. Why?”

“Oh, it's just a little more idiosyncratic than I'm used to. That's not a bad thing,” he adds in a hurry as she starts to frown. “I'm impressed. Um. That sounds more patronising than I meant, I didn't-”

“Hey,” she says with a smile, “I ain't takin' offence.” At least, not any more, Norm thinks.

Still, he smiles back at her. “You've just been trained to think differently than us Navy techs, I think. So, the rewiring signature is different. And I was just clarifying, because if you've rebuilt it-”

“Than you can't do what you'd normally do if it was all standard.” It both is, and isn't, a question.

“Exactly.”

“'Kay then. Need me to explain anythin'?”

“Yeah, actually, when you pulled this wire out here, where did you do you hook it up?”

She shifts her chair closer and ducks her head to peer at her work. For a moment, Norm is entirely distracted by her proximity. She smells of sweat, soap and skin, and her short hair looks silky enough that he wants to reach up and run his fingers through it, like a cat's fur. He does, of course, no such thing, and when Chacon starts to talk, he switches easily back into being Spellman, Information Technician.

“There,” he says eventually, handing the electric notepad back to her. “Should take three minutes to download, but you'll be able to read it off the ship.

“Ooh, _thanks_ ,” Chacon says, giving him a grateful smile. “I was so pissed. I was _just_ up to- uh, hey, you read it?”

“Yep,” Norm says, leaving out that he could still write in Elvish.

“Good, it's brilliant, everyone should read it. Anyway, I was just up to Éowyn and the Witch King, and it's one of my _favourite_ parts, and-” She flexes her fingers to demonstrate her frustration.

“And you had your page saved and then there was a pulse,” Norm finished.

“Yeah,” she says, sourly. “Hell, probably the same one that caught the _Prov_. Happened 'bout a month or so ago, give or take?”

“A bit more give than take, I think, but the timing sounds right. I don't think they would have too many pulses on hand. Not to mention that-”

“-It'd be a bitch to fortify their own systems.” Her voice lilts up at the end, questioning her own finishing of his sentence. But it'd been exactly what he was going to say, so Norm grins at her.

“I think their info-techs might all defect, _en masse_ ,” he says, and gets one of her laughs. Then she shakes her head slightly.

“But, look, seriously, thanks.”

“No problem.”

“'Course, now the question is – do I skip back to where I was, assumin' the text size and page numbers all line up, or do I take the opportunity to revel in my-”

“ _Yours?_ ”

“Fine, _our_ pirating skills,” she flashes him a smile, “and start all over.”

“Well,” he says, thinking it over. “You did say Éowyn and the Witch-King was your favourite part, yeah?”

“Yep.”

“I think you deserve it, really. Um.”

Fortunately, she takes that in the spirit it's offered, and laughs softly. “No living man am I,” she quotes, her smile soft and delighted and wry, all at once. “Maybe that's what I'll do. Saves wadin' through all the world-building, and Éowyn is-”

A scream cuts her off. Not a scream of pain or fear (Norm's quite good at deciphering those by now), but of anger. Chacon has frozen. The sound comes again, and this time it doesn't stop. The sound is made of words, but screamed too high, too fast, for him to begin to understand them.

He's not sure that he wants to.

“Shit,” Chacon hisses, dropping her reader and scrambling to her feet. She's two steps to the door before he gathers his wits enough to follow.

“What?” He manages, following into step behind her.

“I know that voice,” she snaps, and stops so sharply in the passageway that he nearly collides into her. “Goddamn this motherfucking ship, can't work out where he is.” The impressive thing is, she doesn't even seem angry. It's something to say, something to fill the air with a sound not the screams.

“Should be down that way, maybe around the corner-” he says, mostly to empty air as Chacon takes his directions and runs to follow them. Norm hesitates for a moment – stay, get help, follow – and then takes off after her. He's had long practice at navigating the _Providence_ , and in stormy weather, which is the main reason he avoids colliding into her a second time.

The other reason he avoids colliding into her is that someone is pointing a gun at them.

At least the screaming has stopped. For the moment.

“Geary,” Chacon says, _very_ evenly, “why don't you put the gun down, huh?”

Geary shakes his head, but at least he's now pointing the weapon at the ceiling.

Chacon takes a step towards him.

It's spooky, Norm thinks from a bizarre mental distance, just how fast the Marines' reflexes are – Geary with pointing the gun at Chacon, and Chacon for freezing again.

“Someone,” Geary says hoarsely, “stole it.”

“Stole what?” Chacon asks.

Geary shakes his head. “It's _mine_. It has _all my games on it and you stole it!_ ”

Games?

“I didn't steal anythin', Jimmy,” Chacon says, far calmer than Norm would be if a crazed squad-mate was pointing a gun at _him_.

“Stole those Kevlar vests.”

“C'mon, that wasn't _stealing_. That was requisitioning.”

Geary's still shaking his head. “No, no, you _stole_ it. For the wires. _WHERE IS IT?_ ” The shriek echoes around the corridor and normally, Norm would jump at the sudden sound, but he's frozen. Can't move. People don't point guns at him, they just don't.

Chacon doesn't seem that fazed at all. “Okay,” she agrees, “I stole it.”

Under the circumstances, it takes Norm longer than normal to recognise the 'agreeing with the crazy person' note in her voice.

“GIVE IT BACK!”

“Gonna hafta to put the gun down first.”

“NO I WON'T UNTIL YOU, HEY! LET ME GO.” Norm blinks. He hadn't even noticed the other Marines walking behind Geary, only now the three of them have grabbed him, one for each arm, the third going straight for the gun. Once she wrestles the gun away, the third Marine steps back and lets Doc Sohn, who'd been making up the rear, sedate Geary.

“Jesus,” the third Marine says as she watches Geary be carried off to the infirmary, running her hand through her blonde hair.

“Gunny?” This is Chacon, sounding oddly (or perhaps under the circumstances, not oddly at all) hesitant. The older woman glances at her, and smiles a bit at her expression.

“Geary'll be fine,” the gunnery sergeant says, and then her smile turns knowing. “So, I wasn't the only one you got new gear for.”

Chacon – impossibly – straightens. “Gunnery Sergeant Bell, I was just making sure the company didn't have any more defective vests like yours or mine-”

“Save it, kid,” Bell says, her voice amused and weary, all at once. She looks at Chacon with those piercing, too-blue eyes for a moment, and nods. “Geary'll be okay,” she repeats, tone almost gentle. “Just another crash. And some idiot stole his reader and set him off.”

Another crash?

“Yes, gunny,” Chacon says, perfectly unreadable.

“Now scat.”

Chacon nods, salutes, and bolts, and Norm quickly follows suit. The pair make their way in silence back to the library, both too wrapped up in their thoughts to speak. And Norm, at least, is too shaken to really try.

“Y'know,” Chacon says at last, slipping her reader back into her satchel, “I used to wonder why Tolkien had the whole Scouring of the Shire. And poor old Frodo with Post-Traumatic Stress that never got better. Then I remember that Tolkien'd been in the First World War.” She looks up at him, her smile crooked and world-weary. “I don't really wonder why anymore. War sucks.”

“I'm-” _sorry_ , he wants to say, but something in her expression kills the words in his mouth. “I know,” is what he actually says. It fits, but it also feels something like a lie. He doesn't know, not in the bone-deep, blood on her hands and screams in her mind that she does. He can't even really imagine it. The whole thing with Geary, as surreal as it had been, is the closest thing to up close and personal he's experienced – all those mortar rounds fired at the _Providence_ had been, well. Fired at the _ship_ , not him. And he has no idea what he thinks about Geary, and the gun, and that look in Geary's eye.

“Night, Spellman.” There is a beat, and Chacon's smile strengthens, brightens. “See you around.”

“I-” Norm stops. He has no idea what he was going to say, only he has to say _something_. As soon as the fragmented words in his head stop spinning and start forming proper sentences, then he can speak, ask questions, work out what the hell just happened.

Chacon pauses, then hoists her satchel over her shoulder, rocks back on her feet. “Look, Geary'll be fine. It's just...a psychotic break. It happens.” Her laugh is oddly breathless, leached of humour. “Insomnia, stims, take us _off_ the stims and we freaking crash. That's all that was.”

“So Bell said.”

“But...?”

He hesitates and then, quick as ripping off a band-aid, says, “Just. Never saw someone go crazy before.”

“Navy boy. You're all so sheltered,” but she says it with a smile more gentle than mocking. “Now I need to get some rack. So. I'll see ya 'round?”

“I think I can fit it into my schedule,” Norm answers, and he gets a blinding grin before she leaves the room.

– –

Part of the trouble is that he thinks too much. Always has, always will, which is why as soon as his four years are up, he is trading in his uniform for civilian clothes and lecture-halls and textbooks and the joys of academia. He'll earn credit for thinking too much then, before, hopefully, be employed and paid for thinking too much. He'll have to publish papers that will involve thinking too much, but not, he suspects, for thinking too much about Lance-Corporal Trudy Chacon. Possibly, though, the surreal, disquieting episode with Geary. Psychotic breaks being common in the military, yes, and maybe he could... Maybe he could start a career in psychology, or the anthropology of the armed forces and their cultures... but in all honesty, that feels a little too much like taking someone's genuine suffering and using it just because it's trendy.

(He's reassured when he sees Geary a day later, looking worn out, speaking in monosyllables, but apparently perfectly sane.)

New Jersey, she had said, but if anything, her accent is more Texan ( _more_ , but not entirely). Hispanic, from both name and looks, and he's heard her joking around in liquid, mother-tongue Spanish with some of the other Marines. Christian from the locket at her neck; the small (he wants to say _book_ , and isn't sure why) gold charm marked with a tiny, perfectly symmetrical black cross. Not a crucifix, but he's unfamiliar enough with religious symbolism that he has no idea if lack of a crucifix means she's not a Catholic. Not to mention that _Christian_ , no matter the flavour, is normally enough for him to stay away. He, an atheist born, bred, and raised, simply can't fathom going out with a person who has such a different world-view. But-

“Dude, if you're gonna keep on staring at that Marine like that, she's gonna carve you up for dinner.”

“I'm not staring,” Norm says automatically, but he can feel his ears flush with the lie. Quickly, he ducks his head and concentrates on the meal in front of him. And on trying to stop his cup from sliding off the table every time the _Providence_ hits a large enough wave.

“I'm serious,” Chang continues. “The Marines are hard-core. I mean, they're _psycho_. You've got no chance.”

Norm eyes him. At twenty-three, Information Systems Technician James Chang is four years older, eight inches shorter, and has taken Norm under his wing. Or, as Chang prefers to describe it, Norm is his Minion of the Lab.

“...is that, no chance in asking her out, or no chance in....something else?”

“She'll eat you,” Chang says. “Alive,” he adds solemnly, stabbing his food with his fork.

Norm remembers the way her smile lit up her face. It was an open smile, a delighted smile. She was talking about _Lord of the Rings_ while wearing that smile. “I really doubt it,” he says, and ignores Chang's disbelieving snort.


	4. Geeks in Uniform

To start with, Norm wasn't sure if it was just coincidence that he tended to bump into Chacon after two in the morning on the deck of the _Providence_. She claimed insomnia when he asked, and that it was either wake up at four or go to bed after two, and yeah. That was, in fact, how she finished her sentence, complete with a stiff enough shrug that he didn't ask why she had trouble sleeping in the first place. If nothing else, he can hazard a pretty good guess. He said he didn't mind seeing her, which _is_ true. As far as it goes. It just doesn't really go far enough to explain why one stormy night he finds himself discussing zombies in film with her for three hours in one of the common rooms.

He doesn't even _like_ the horror genre. Scaring himself is not really on his list of life's pleasures, although he does understand the adrenaline rush that fear provides. What he doesn't understand is doing something to cause that rush when you can't do anything with it, when you have to sit in front of a screen and just _watch_.

“That's part of the fun of it,” Chacon objects. “It's safe. You can just sit there and enjoy the rush because you're not _required_ to do anything. You're not gonna get wasted or fucked up or anything just by watching it.”

“Not wasted, I grant you,” he says, trying not to get distracted by how telling the term 'wasted' is. “But _Armistice Day_ scared the _hell_ out of me.”

“Oh, but I love that movie.”

Norm stares at her, and then has to brace his food against the wall as his ship hits another steep wave. “Really?” he asks her, once he gets his breath back. She moves back into her position in the corner, sucking spilled coffee off her hand.

“Yep. It's...amazing. And it really makes you think.”

“About?”

“...how old were you when you watched it?”

“Eight or nine.”

“Ohhh. That explains it.”

Norm blinks. “Huh?”

“You normally seem pretty perceptive when it comes to theme and subtext and all of that,” she says, flashing him a quick grin. He grins back, possibly a little too broadly, but it was a _compliment_.

“Thank you. Uh, okay, what did I miss?”

“All the dead soldiers coming out of the ground and urns to protest the continuation of war?” Chacon says, drily. “Pretty big anti-war theme there.”

“Yeah, I- hrm.” He rubs the back of his head. “Yeah, I did forget about that. But you don't find it, I don't know, depressing to think about?”

She sobers, and regards him for a long moment. She doesn't look older, exactly, but she's gazing at him with eyes that have seen far too much. “Not, depressing,” Chacon says, slowly. “But unsettling, yes. But that's why I love _Armistice Day_. It embraces that, without ever bein' all preachy or melodramatic.”

“I just...have this thing about the dead staying dead, I guess. Once you're dead, that's it. Game over.”

“Well that's depressing.”

“Atheist.”

“So I gathered,” she says, wry as wry can be. “I'm really not.”

“So I gathered,” he says, mimicking her tone as best he can. She takes it in the spirit it's offered, and grins at him. Then shrugs. “The other thing I really love about _Armistice Day_ , is, you know, it's an anti-war flick without ever being anti- _soldier_. Those kinds of movies, I get so mad at. Can't watch 'em.” Then she shakes her head and shakes off the edge that had appeared. She leans forward, and those dark eyes of hers seem impossibly to brighten. “But that's what I mean. You can do so, so many things with zombies, play around with way more themes than in most other horror movies.”

“Different from vampires and werewolves and ghosts?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, come on, when was the last time you saw a working-class vampire, huh? Vampires are slick and elitist and shit. _Ve ruled Romania when vour ancestors vere on a farm, and now can afford to buy everythink, because ve also practice the ancient craft of tax evasion_.” Chacon's mock-Eastern European accent is terrible, and he really can't help but laugh before she grins, rolls her eyes, continues. “And then oh my god, _werewolves_. They're gangsters and punks. And _if_ they are nobility, it's always the Scottish kind with kilts and bare chests, you know? But normally they're not, so it's upper-class civilisation verses lower class barbarity. And fuck that shit. But _zombies_ ,” and he loves the way she luxuriates in the word, “they're flexible.”

“You forgot,” he says, more than a little entertained by her monologue, “to mention ghosts.”

“Mmm, true. But they freak me out.”

Norm blinks. “So, what, cannibalistic corpses don't scare you, but _ghosts_ do?”

Chacon grins. Or at least, she bares her teeth, which a number of species regard as a gesture of defiance instead of joy. It's a stance he can't really argue with. “Can't shoot ghosts. Can shoot zombies.”

He laughs softly. “Okay, that's fair.” He thinks for a moment. “Although, I think you can shoot ghosts with rock-salt.”

The Marine stares at him. “Yes,” she says, slowly, “because I carry rock-salt around with me. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that they can go through walls and you can see them and they are creepy. No ghosts.”

“No ghosts. Got it.”

“Good boy.” She grins at his expression. “So, zombies.”

“I'm listening,” he says, entirely honestly.

“As I was saying, they are really flexible. You can run with environmental themes, anti-consumerism, anti-uh, just how our society runs. All at the same time as either scarin' the hell outta folk, or makin' em laugh. Or both.”

“Like?” He grins at _her_ expression. “I'm assuming you have examples?”

There is a moment of silence, and then she beams at him, her expression sunny and bright and lighting up her face again. “Damn fucking straight I do,” Chacon says, and proceeds to him give him a crash-course in the past two hundred years of Great Zombie Flicks.

– –

“Zombies,” Chang says flatly at breakfast.

“Zombies.”

“You had a hot girl's undivided attention for _three hours_ and you talked about _zombies_. You make me sad, Spellman. You really do.”

Norm gives him the finger

– –

“Wa-a-a-ait a minute, back up,” Chacon says one night, rubbing her head.

“Backing up.”

“The Ancient Greeks used the same word for blue, brown and black.”

“Yep.”

“And that word was violet.”

“...the Greek word for violet. Or purple. But yeah.”

“Well, obviously. But. According to them, I'm...violet. Purple.”

“...yep.”

“With violet skin. And violet eyes. And ma-a-a-a-aybe wine-coloured hair. Like the ocean.”

“Sounds about right.”

“And they used the same word that means 'green' for honey. And turning pale with fear.” And honey, but neither of them have seen it, so it doesn't make much sense to mention again.

“Yep.”

“...wow,” she huffs a laugh, and then pauses. “Ow. I think you've actually broken my brain. How. What the hell?” Her tone is wondering.

He laughs a bit.“It's actually a pretty common thing in languages. They don't all view colours the same. Linguists _used_ to think that it was actually a question of them having different vision, but this didn't make much sense.”

“Yeah,” Chacon says drily, “bit hard for the Ancient Greeks to have a different vision from the modern day given how early everyone cleared off for different parts of the globe.”

“Exactly. And it's not even a question of old languages versus modern ones.”

“Yeah?”

“Take Russian.”

“Don't speak a word of it, but okay.”

“I'm bilingual,” he explains.

“...hot,” she says with a grin. “But okay, Russian.”

“In English, light blue and navy blue are viewed as the same colour, right? In Russian, they are two different ones.”

Even in the dark shadows on the deck, he can see her tilt her head. “So, without thinking about it, do y'see 'em as different or the same?”

He makes a face. “I can't answer that.”

“Oh, c'mon!”

“No, seriously. I can't do it off the top of my head. I've thought about it too much, I've lost that automatic preference.”

Chacon snorts at that. “Well that's what thinkin' too much gets ya,” she says, despite the fact that he gets the impression she thinks 'too much' about a lot of things. “What's the most common one? I mean, the most common colour-grouping?”

“Blue and green, I think. At least, it's the one I've run across the most. What's interesting is the Na'vi do that one, too. So, that kind of use of language seems related to culture-level more than species.”

“Interesting,” she says, but her tone is decidedly non-committal.

“Do you have a problem with the Na'vi?” he asks, curiously. It's the only thing he can think of to get her tone to switch like that, warm and interested to cool and clipped. She's silent for a long moment.

“I...dislike the media circus,” she says at last, speaking slowly. “I don't have any problem with _them_ , I mean, they live on another damn planet. But the media circus? That....pisses me off. In a lot of ways. And all the books on them, and all the pontificating about what it _means_ to have discovered a whole planet of tree-hugging hippies and, ” she makes a rude sound and waves the subject off.

He hesitates for a moment, and then says, “I think they are fascinating.”

“Lotta folk do.”

There is silence, oddly strained and tense given Chacon is one of the few people that he can say nothing to and feel nothing but comfortable when he does so.

“Look,” Chacon says at last, “it's...stupid, but...okay, yeah it's irrational.”

“What is?” Norm asks, softly.

She doesn't tap her foot or her fingers, doesn't shift or fidget, but just goes still; all her nervous energy whirling inwards, leaving her body perfectly still. “They've gone and found an entire planet made up of the worst clichés of Native Americans. All that bullshit about not affecting the land and being one with nature...it's a load of crap. When you're talkin' history. The wilderness the whites found? It was only there because all the Indians had died thanks to the virgin-soil epidemics before the whites got to that part of the continent. Both the continents. I mean, they treated the land better than Western society ended up doing, but they _managed_ it. Like gamekeepers. And then that's ignoring all the buildings, all the cultures who had farms and rank. Like the Mexica Triple Alliance and the Inka are all just an aberration instead of part of a pattern. And it's...all the same crap. And the Na'vi are just. They've set it all off again.” She pauses, takes a deep breath. “And hey, maybe they really are so low down on the food-chain that they are like chimps or something, and they don't burn the forest to keep it maintained. They don't plant fruit trees and farm 'em like that. Maybe it's because they are aliens they can actually _be_ all apparently one with nature because they don't change anythin'. But it just offends me, they're so much like that cliché which people hold up, and it's all started _again_. Which is stupid, I know, given my folks come from Peru, and no one's ever accused the Inka of bein' tree-huggers,” but she's saying it prickly, defensive, not apologetic at all.

“I...try not to tell people about what they should or shouldn't be offended about,” Norm says, which is one of those things he says where it comes off as patronising and he really doesn't mean it to be. But he's quickly learning that Chacon doesn't usually seem to take offence at things like that, like she's used to the slightly socially awkward and can decipher what they intend to say rather than what they have. He wants to ask more what she means, wants to know the facts and dates and history that is clearly in her head, but he bites his tongue. Later. Maybe. He wants to just be with her more than try and argue academic points that are clearly making her genuinely angry.

Later. Maybe.

“Good,” she is what she says. “Otherwise I'd have to kick your ass.” She's five foot four, tops, to his six foot two, and he believes it. “But hey,” she says brightly, rolling to her feet. “At least the Na'vi can't catch smallpox, y'know?”

“There is that,” Norm says. “You heading in?”

“Yeah. Might as well pretend to get to sleep.” Chacon grins at him and walks backwards, tossing him a lazy salute. “Night, Spellman. Catch ya later.”

He salutes her back, but when he himself heads off, he has her words that she said and all the ones she didn't running around in his head.

– –

“So, _this_ is where you sneak off to!”

Both Norm and Chacon pause in their conversation and look up at the figure now standing in front of them with his hands on his hips.

“...yes,” Norm says at last, “because you've had no idea.”

Chang is standing in the shine of the newly-replaced deck lights, which makes it easy to see his grin. Chacon just raises her eyebrows at the intrusion.

“Chang,” Chang says, giving her a nod that is sharp despite his expression.

“Chacon,” she says, her replying nod more guarded.

“I,” Chang continues, “have been hearing a lot about you.”

Norm pinches the bridge of his nose. “Chang.”

“Quiet, minion.”

“Why should he be?” Chacon asks, and Norm is torn between wincing at her tone and grinning. And also concern; for all she had been obviously enjoying their conversation (a vital summarising of two of the last three seasons of _Fantasia210_ , as Chacon has been at war and missed them), she is clearly starting to hit the edge of her ability to function without a decent night sleep. “He's off-duty, you don't seem like you need him. And we were geekin' out.”

 _Definitely_ losing her ability to judge things. At least Chang doesn't outrank her.

“Ye-es,” Chang says, eyeing her. “I've been hearing about that.”

“What,” Chacon says, eyebrows aching up again, “geeks can't join the Marine Corps?”

“It's more...I didn't think Marines would be geeks.”

“...right,” she says. “Well. We can. And we do join. And we're just as badass as everyone else.”

“Everyone else?”

“Other Marines,” Chacon says, and she's grinning as she says it. It's a similar expression to the one she had when explaining her thing about shooting zombies, but even at night, on the deck of a ship, there is a fierceness to the expression. It's a shining, brilliant, _wolfish_ expression, a _do you want to make something of it_ grin.

The dangers of infantry, and the Marines, it seems.

Fortunately, Chang seems to recognise it. “So, it's like a chicken-and-the-egg problem,” he says.

Chacon, warily, says, “what?”

“Geeks in the Marines. So, which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“Egg,” she says, promptly. This time, her grin is merely sunny. “Y'never said if it was a chicken egg.”

“Yeah,” Chang says, “but that was _implied-_ ”

“You never actually said 'chicken egg',” Norm says, aware that he is breaking male solidarity, but he can't help it. He's an academic at heart, born and bred to dissect sentences.

“Exactly,” Chacon says, and then laughs at Chang's expression. “It could have been a pre-chicken egg. Or a dinosaur egg. Which means that geeks join the Marines before Marines become geeks.”

“- I have no idea if that makes any sense,” Chang tells the stars, earning a giggle from the badass, geeky Marine.

“Perfect sense,” she says, loftily, and then hauls herself to her feet. Norm allows himself to feel a flash of disappointment (more than a flash, the emotion had been present since Chang made his presence known) at the signal for his and her conversation to be winding up, and then also stands up.

“0200-sense,” Norm adds, “is still sense.”

“Right,” says Chang, kind of smirking at them. Chacon looks at him for a a brief moment, and then shrugs.

“Should be headin' in, though,” she says. “Later.” This last part is directed at Norm, who nods in reply with a quick smile.

“Your girlfriend's punchy,” Chang observes once Chacon has gone.

“Insomnia's catching up with her, I think,” Norm says, and then stops. “She's not my girlfriend.”

“She certainly _wants_ to be.” Chang shoves Norm's shoulder lightly. “Better hurry up and ask her.”

“She's perfectly capable of asking _me_ if she wants.” If she wanted. He could ask, he really could. They are coming up to port in three days, and this idyll of late night geek-outs is running out of nights and he _could_ ask. He wants to. But Chacon's vibrant, and attractive as hell, and easy-going, and those kinds of people are never single. It'd wreck things to ask.

Wouldn't it?

“Besides,” he continues, “you were telling me before that she was going to eat me alive.”

“Norm, Norm, Norm, Norm. This is why you're never going to laid, like, ever.”

“...I've had sex before, thanks.”

“Ah-huh,” Chang says. Norm half-glares at him, then shrugs it off. Then, with the grumpiness of people who know each other too well and not at all, they head inside themselves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The source of (my knowledge of) the quirks of the Ancient Greek and Russian colour-language is the excellent book _Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different in Other Languages_ , by Guy Deutscher.


	5. Liberty

_October, 2134,  
San Diego County, California, USA_

It takes until the night before the _Providence_ pulls into the Naval Base at San Diego for the fact that she's coming up to port to sink in. The _finally_ runs around the ship, unsaid in front of officers and not mentioned in front of the enlisted ranks, but felt and said by just about everyone. The _Providence_ is a big ship, but she certainly doesn't feel that way carrying an entire extra battalion. (Well. _Most_ of an extra battalion.) Normally, he'd be nothing relieved that the current journey is nearly at an end, that the human cargo are going to remove themselves and march somewhere else.

But this time round, that will mean that Chacon – Trudy, Trudy Chacon – is marching somewhere else, too.

In retrospect, the fact that she didn't turn up at their normal place the night before she disembarks gives him enough time to think and find his resolve to ask her what her plans were after leaving the ship. Ask if her they could, possibly, continue this hanging out and geeking during his shore-leave; and, hell, if anything else came from _that_ he so had no objections, but it'd been long enough since he'd had a girlfriend that while his imagination was fairly explicit, the rest of his mind and reasoning were cautiously vague.

If she says yes, then excellent. If no, well, he probably won't see her again anyway. And if he _doesn't_ ask, then he _certainly_ won't ever see her again.

He really wants to see her again.

There is also the knowledge that if he doesn't ask, Chang will use this to rib on him for the rest of their deployment. Norm possesses just enough self-awareness to file this away as an example of a subtle form of peer pressure, even as he ruefully admit that it works.

Which is how, before his next shift starts, he finds himself trying to find Chacon on a ship full of thousands of people, all wearing uniforms. Navy in grey fatigues (...mostly), Marines in urban desert, all moving in differing directions-

“SPELLMAN!”

Norm turns, steps to the side to get out of the way, and Chacon darts through the crowd to meet him.

“Hi,” she says, grinning at him. “Good thing you're so damn lanky.”

“You were looking for me?”

Chacon bites her bottom lip, flashes another grin. “Yeah-huh. I was, um-”

“Good, I was actually, I was wondering,” he starts at the same time, and they stop.

She huffs a laugh, stepping in closer and raising her face. “Okay, you go first. But quick, I gotta run soon.”

“Yeah, so do I. I was wondering, um, I've got.” He stops, takes a deep breath, and then leans in slightly so she can hear better. “When I've got liberty, would you be up for, uh, would you still want to, uh. Hang out?”

Chacon's eyes widen, her eyebrows going up. “You askin' me on a date?”

“It doesn't have to be,” he says, quickly. “If. You don't want it to?”

“Oh. Okay,” she says, slowly, and just _smiles_ at him. She grabs his hand and hurriedly scrawls a number on it. “You,” she says, very precisely “call me. And it'll be a date. Okay?”

He's grinning now, and can't seem to stop. “Okay.”

She beams at him, delighted. “Good.” And then Chacon stands on her tip-toes, pulls him down by the shoulder and kisses him, quick and fierce and in front of everyone. He's too startled to really react, and it's only when she's meters away, about to turn a corner into a different p-way, that he's even aware of the rest of the people in this area of the ship being _terribly_ entertained on his account. Catcalls, wolf-whistles, shouted bits of advice.

“Go Spellman!” Someone calls out.

“She'll eat you!” Someone else yells and, Norm gives them the one-fingered salute before continuing his way to his lab, walking to the sound of laughter.

He's not going to hear the end of this for _months_.

For some reason, he doesn't really mind.

– –

Two days later, Norm makes his way to San Clemente It's not that far from San Diego by train, and while he has to travel south, she has to travel north from Camp Pendleton. The other advantage of San Clemente – like San Diego – is that his uniform gets barely a second glance from the civilians.

Civilians. Thousands and thousands and thousands of them, dressed in all the colours and styles under the sky, moving through the streets and on and off trains. There a cluster of Muslim schoolgirls with multi-hued scarves over their hair and intricately decorated masks over their faces; there a man in a dark green suit; there a woman in a grey suit and don't-fuck-with-me heels; there a pair of fathers sitting with their daughter, the blond one trying to convince the little girl to keep her filter-mask on (she's not buying it).

And the swirl and colour of life on land, in the civilian world, continues when he looks out the window. It's a popular conceit nowdays to talk of the urban sprawl as grey, dying, soulless, and, yes, he can still see that. But there is a colour and noise and life that maybe he had to go away in order to come back and see. Half of him feels that he is being overly romantic about it all, that it's different when in two weeks time, he's back on a mostly grey ship with pipes and wires open against the metal walls and he doesn't have to live with the constant advertising against the sky, but the other half is enjoying watching it all too much to care.

He nearly misses his stop, too, which he hasn't done since he was eleven. He is, he feels, quite out of practice at being a civilian. Still, a city is no more confusing than a ship, and he manages to make it to the plaza that he and Chacon agreed to. It's a nice place, with some graceful pillars that change colour as one moves about them and a wide area in the middle, down some steps (and four ramps, set in the corner). The plaza probably isn't that busy by a civilian's standards, but it's busy enough; by now, Norm's used to the chaos of crowds actually being ordered, not a true chaos like this.

Stopping at one pillar, he scans the area in search of Chacon. Unconsciously, he's looking for the androgynous girl he knew on the ship; the Marine as he first saw her all those weeks ago, in her loose uniform and short, sharply cropped hair. And so at first, he can't see Chacon anywhere.

Then he catches sight of a black-haired girl sitting on the steps, her back against a pillar, an old-fashioned paper sketchbook balanced on her bare knees. Short hair slightly longer and wavier on top, a Marine's crew-cut growing out now that the tour is over. Military-issue, half-face filter-mask like his own. She's still wearing her combat boots, but instead of her desert fatigues, she has on a pair of (short) dark red shorts and a sleeveless black top with the collar flipped up. In the sunlight that filters through the perpetual clouds, her skin is far more brown than it seemed on the ship, and she's abruptly feminine in a way that makes him stare, just a little too long. And he doesn't flatter himself that the smooth skin on her legs has anything much to do with him; more likely, it's an act of reaffirming to herself that she can be a civilian, that she's not in a war. Still, he can appreciate the view.

Chacon's hand movements pause and she glances up, biting down on her bottom lip as she frowns in a familiar way. It's enough to break his startlement and he makes his way over.

“Hey.”

“Jesus,” she says, jumping and then grinning up at him. “Hey.”

“Sorry, I didn't mean-”

“Nah, it's cool. I was off in my own world.” Her brightness is a little bit forced, as if her not having heard him come up struck something deeper than mere surprise.

But he doesn't know how to ask, or even if he should, so he just says, “You were drawing the crowd?”

“Hah! Hardly.” She holds up her sketchbook and he squats down to look. The picture is a rough sketch of the plaza, details entered in seeming at random, just enough to get the idea of the place. But instead of humans, what peoples the plaza is a host of fantastic beings both surreal and cartoony.

“This is...really good,” he says, mostly because it's true. Right down to the small figure in fatigues, sitting on the steps drawing it all.

“I am a woman of many talents,” Chacon says, her glance over his face a combination of assessing and speculative. He can feel the tips of his ears heat, and tries to ignore it.

“And by night, do you fight crime?” he asks, sitting down next to her. She smirks at him.

“That'd be tellin'.”

“Masked avenger with a ca-”

“No capes.”

“Ah, so it's more of the ninja approach, then,” Norm says, and she laughs, presses her finger to her filter-mask covered lips.

“ _Anyway_ ,” she says, “how's your liberty leave treating you?”

“Fine, so far.” Even if he's still wearing his uniform, he's not on the ship. And he's with her. “Got a few days off.”

“A few?”

“Three.”

“Well,” she says, and she smirks, her smile crooked and pleased all at once. “I've got a few ideas of what we could do.”

He eyes her, sensing the laughter behind her expression. “Something nefarious?” he asks, a smile tugging at his own mouth.

“Scandalous even,” Chacon says. “Definitely means we have to be on first-name basis.”

“Well, gee, I don't know,” he says, and she grins at him. “Norm,” he says then, grinning back and offering her his hand.

“Trudy.”

– –

There is something, Norm decides, about finding someone else who does the same things as you. Things that other people deem annoying. Like staying in the movie theatre until the end of the credits. That kind of thing.

“Damn,” says Chacon – _Trudy_ – leaning back in her chair and pouting slightly at the screen. “I was hoping for something at the end.”

“It's kinda like a law of the universe, isn't it?” he observes. “You wait, there is nothing – you go, and then everyone raves about seeing something.”

“Yeah, it's not...quite Murphy's Law, but I'm sure there has to be _some_ thing...”

“There is, kind of. In Russian, uh.” He rubs the back of his head. “Not sure how to translate it. Law of Fucked Up? Yes. No.”

She glances over at him. “Huh. No, I think I get it,” she adds, getting to her feet and linking her hands together before stretching her arms up. “And we'd better run before we get attacked by brooms.”

He glances over at the ushers at the doorway, and winces. “That'd be a shame. Lunch?”

“God, yes, I'm starving. And we've got an hour and a bit before _The Two Towers_ , and I really need to geek at you about _Fellowship_.” She jumps down the last couple of stairs, pirouettes and beams up at him. “ _That_ was a fun movie. And _this_ is fun. And I really, really kinda want to be a dwarf now and live in Moira.”

He laughs, following her out of the theatre. “You mean, before the Balrog woke up and killed everyone?”

Chacon sticks her tongue out at him. “Yes. Before that. They had mechanical things. And gadgets. And axes. And it makes me happy.”

“See, I just want to go and live with the elves now.”

“Yeah, I can kinda see that...but nah. Mechs and badass short people with axes for me. Although, is it just me, or were the elves rocking a kinda tribal look?”

“...hm, now that you mention it.”

“Na'vi,” Chacon says, looking resigned. “That's what they reminded me of. Na'vi, with all those braids and armbands.”

“Well, cultural influence. After all, there are some similarities there -”

“What, tall, pointed ears, everyone goes 'ooh, pretty'?” she retorts, and then winces. “Okay, that was...bitchy of me. And, you're right – I can see the logic there. Those kinds of braids have been common for a while. And, I mean, a lot of Moira seemed inspired by Martian architecture. So, it's probably deliberately done.”

Norm watches Chacon ( _Trudy_. Trudy, Trudy, Trudy) for a moment. “See, now you're making me think that there is going to be another planet or moon out there that is going to be like Mordor,” he says, skipping geeky and serious for geeky and ridiculous. From her cackle, the distraction works.

“Great, we could have an intergalactic quest to destroy the One Ring.”

“I have no idea why you are being so sarcastic, it would be brilliant.”

“Geek.”

He smiles. “Takes one to know one.” Then he pauses. “In _ter_ galactic or in _tra_ galactic?”

Trudy (yes, _Trudy_ now) slants him an amused look, a grin chasing itself around her mouth. “Probably intra. Don't wanna get greedy now, do we? Plenty of stars in the galaxy. And, speakin' of greedy-” as they turn the corner she flings out her arm in a dramatic gesture at the food court, “-what you want for lunch?”

– –

It's not late when they finally emerge from the theatre, but after marathoning three movies, it feels like it. Still, early enough that they when they stroll into San Clemente's Little India, all the restaurants and food-stalls are still wide open.

“Also, it's a Friday,” Trudy points out when Norm comments on this.

“...it is?”

She glances at him and huffs a laugh. “Yeah, yeah it is.”

“I. Wow, my sense of time is messed up,” he says, and this time her laugh is more full-bodied.

“Military thing, ain't it? You're on a ship, I'm out in the field, doesn't really matter what the day is, it's all same old.”

“I know the _date_ ,” he protests, and then just shakes his head. Truth be told, he's feeling a little off balance – it's a little thing, but it still feels odd to have himself referred to as 'military'. He just happens to work on a ship, wear a uniform, have a rank and have to salute his superiors. That's all. He shakes his head again, banishing the thoughts so he can concentrate. Given Trudy's just grabbed his hand to pull him somewhere, concentrating on her and now is not that hard.

She leads him to some little corner place he wouldn't have given a second glance to, aside from to study the paintwork and carving in the door. _That_ is fascinating. As are the people; the other customers, the two waitresses in black, the owner or manager in a sari with gold rings on her thin hands that flash as she calls Trudy 'darling' and leads them over to a window table.

“'Darling'?” Norm asks, glancing at Trudy over the menu. She rolls her eyes in response.

“There are significant parts of the population to whom that is a common form of conversational endearment,” Trudy says, her prim tone combining with her Texan drawl to make her sound like a southern belle.

“I know, I know, I just haven't run across it in a while.”

“You need to get out more,” she replies after a pause, her mouth curving reassuringly.

He smiles wryly making. “True enough. One downside to the _Prov_ , I really don't get out a lot. But I have caught up on my reading.”

“Oh, please,” she scoffs. “No one _ever_ catches up with their reading. It's one of the Laws of the Universe.”

“...point. Always something else to read.”

“And then you go back and _re_ read stuff, and in the meantime, you are runnin' out of both physical _and _electronic shelf space...”__

 _“Which is _another_ Law of the Universe...”_

Trudy grins at him. “Exactly.”

“Speaking of rereading, you've read _Lord of the Rings_ more recently than I have...do they have actual, real meat here?”

“Mmhmm. Costs a lot, but yeah. And the rest of the food is pretty fantastic. Kinda like just being _near_ the real stuff makes the rest of it taste kinda real.”

“And. You could just walk in and get a seat. Somewhere where there is real meat and spices.”

“Mmhmm,” she says, but this time she looks more impish. “Went through boot with the owner's kid.”

“And pulled him out of that burning truck,” the owner – another older woman in a sari, not the one who greeted them - scolds, causing Norm to jump slightly. Restaurants always make him nervous, the people who work in them all seemingly gifted with the ability of teleportation.

“Yes, ma'am,” Trudy is saying, promptly enough that he guesses she doesn't really want to remember the burning truck. “How's Krish doin'?”

“Got into college, doing English. And he's getting used to his new arm.”

“Huh, the VA actually did some good, there?”

The owner snorts. “Hardly, bunch of bastards. We paid for it ourselves.”

“Yeah,” Trudy says with a look of deep contempt. “That's the damn VA for ya.”

“Bastards,” the owner repeats. “What would you like, Trudy?”

Trudy glances at Norm; he spreads his fingers. “It....all looks wonderful. You choose,” he says.

“Alrighty,” Trudy grins, and rattles off a number of dishes. Using the Indian names, he notes.

“You've had dealings with the VA?” he asks once the owner has gone. She nods.

“Yeah. Um. Not me, personally, but...my mom was a Marine. Mechanic. There was an explosion, and...she ended up losin' one leg, and having the other fucked up. So, kinda grew up with battles with the VA. They're getting worse, too, with all the pressure to stop spendin' so much on the military.”

“Cost-cutting and publicity,” Norm says quietly, and watches as her mouth twists.

“Yeah. Send us off to war, and then just throw us away. You were saying about Lord of the Rings?”

It's not the most graceful subject change he's ever heard, but he takes it.

– –

“Come back with me,” Trudy says, later. A few hours later, actually; they're back at the plaza where they started, filter-masks off because she's nursing a small whiskey while he's got a bottle of soda. There'd been a peach, too, shared between them. A rare, expensive, actual peach grown in an actual farm tower. Her choice, because he'd never think of it. “Mom used to get one for me on my birthday,” she had said when he'd looked startled. “And I signed up on my eighteenth, and spent my nineteenth and twentieth birthdays bein' shot at. So you know what, I think I deserve a damn peach.”

After that, he didn't argue when she'd offered half. Her peach, she could do what she wanted with it. He can understand that.

Except now she is saying, “Come back with me,” and it takes him longer than perhaps it should to work out what she means.

“...where? What, to...your base?”

“Cheaper than a hotel,” Trudy says, her smile impish. “Unless...there is a reason I shouldn't offer?”

“No! Um, I mean. I can't think of anything. And I want-” Norm stops, tries to arrange his thoughts to be sensible. Not easy, in the face of her bright, hopeful smile. “Rules on, uh, overnight guests?”

“Fine on Fridays and Saturdays.” Her smile is still impish.

“Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously. God.” She rolls her eyes. “Not gonna blemish your shiny record.”

“I was thinking more about you.” Well, also him; there is the whole 'being invited back to a camp _full of Marines_ ' issue. But rules are rules, and the Marines seem to be half a cult and-

“Flattering,” Trudy says. “Or patronisin', I haven't decided. Don't worry, I'm not gonna get busted over this.”

“Roommate?”

Trudy is eerily still for a moment. “She won't be a problem,” she says, voice clipped and face expressionless. He wants to ask, but-

“Okay,” he says, and is rewarded by a grateful smile.

– –

Walking into Camp Pendleton has to be one of the more nerve-racking experiences of his life. Sort of like when Keyna pulled him back to her family's apartment and promised no one was there, only this time there'd be thousands of other people, with guns, and he's Navy, and once Trudy shoves him into her room and shuts the door, he starts to laugh.

“ _Navy boy_ ,” Trudy says, making a face at him.

“Well, yeah.” There are two beds in the neat room, one made and one stripped. Given Trudy's expression before, he's not going to ask about where her room-mate is, and so he just sits on the bed with the blankets. “Actually, kinda a bit like Gimli in the Mines. You know, when all the orcs start swarming.”

She pauses in the middle of pulling off one of her boots. “Like Gimli. _How?_ ”

“Outnumbered.”

Trudy blinks, and then she just laughs, sitting heavily on the bed next to him. “Fine,” she says, suppressing her laughter into a smirk, “But y'know, I'd rather think you're closer to Legolas in that situation. You're Team Elf, remember. _I'm_ Team Dwarf.

Norm regards her with all the solemnity that the situation merits. “Does this mean we have to start a millennia long feud?”

She crinkles her nose. “I'd prefer to skip to the make-outs myself.”

He swallows. “I, uh. Wouldn't say no.”

Trudy's smirk widens into a hopeful grin. “This mean you'd say yes?”

“Hell yeah,” Norm breathes out, and then flushes. “I mean, yes.”

That gets a quiet laugh. “Outstanding,” she says, and crawls over. He sits very still, not entirely sure what to do – meet her half way? And what to do with his hands, and Jesus _Christ_ it's been so long since he's done anything like this that he can't really _remember_ , and then she kisses him.

She'd kissed him on the _Providence_ , but that was quick, and in public, and he'd been too stunned to note anything more than just the fact that her lips were hot and smooth. Here there is a door which is closed and a bed and he can take his time, actually note things. Trudy tastes a bit like whiskey, a bit like peaches: expensive, out of his league. Mostly, she just tastes of her own distracting self.

He kisses her back, bringing one hand up to her shoulder. The movement is tentative, but Trudy doesn't move away so he slowly ghosts his hand down the side of her torso to her waist. The other hand he brings up to her neck, thumb against her jaw. Her skin is hot under his fingers, as if all her drive and energy actually converts to physical heat. The way he is sitting has him off-balance, but to fix that would mean shifting away, stop touching her, and that is something Norm really doesn't want to do.

Trudy presses in closer, puts her hand against his chest and pushes against him. The instruction is clear enough, but their combined weight makes Norm fall back against the bed much more suddenly than they expected. She ends up sprawled over him, the kiss broken thanks to both fall and her breathy laughter.

“Okay,” she says, trying to muffle her giggles, “that totally worked out in my head a lot better.”

He raises his eyebrows at her and contemplates their position for a moment. They're on the bed, she's on _him_ , one of her legs between his so when she shifts, just like _that_ , it's just _oh, wow_ as he tries not to groan. Or whimper. “I think it worked just fine,” he says, managing to get his voice even as he can _feel_ his ears burning red.

Trudy pauses, and smirks at him. “That so?”

“Yep.”

She puts one hand on her bed and slowly slides a few inches up his body. His breath catches at the sensations this causes, and remains caught as she kisses him again. This time, his hand slides to the back of her head, fingers running over the silky stubble that is masquerading as her hair, just like he's wanted to for weeks. His other hand settles at her waist, thumb experimentally brushing back and forth along her spine. Trudy makes a soft noise, something crossed between a whimper and sigh, and she moves against him, as if trying to get closer ( _yes, please_ ). One of her hands is on his chest and the other has snaked around to the back of his neck, but if her hands are being tame and G-rated, her mouth is definitely hitting Mature Audiences Only. Fine, yeah, sure, they are just _kissing_ , and with their clothes still noticeably _on_ , but he feels drunk on it anyway. Drunk and feverish, skin prickling and aching all at once. Her hands are still against him, and he wants them to stay still so he can catch his breath, and he wants her hands all over him; touching, gliding, teasing, claiming.

Her hand drops to the bottom of his shirt and snakes under the hem. He doesn't notice, not at first, but then there is the feeling of her fingers against his skin, her short nails lightly dragging across his hip. It feels good, damn good, but the twist in his chest is as much nerves as lust. It's somehow unpleasant, like walking into a test he suddenly realises he knows barely anything about. So he grabs her wrist. It's enough to break the kiss, if not exactly the spell.

“Can we-”

With her free hand braced against the bed, she pushes herself up and looks down at him. He can't read the look on her face, but she's frowning, slightly.

“-slow down? A bit?” he asks, and she bites her bottom lip, nods.

“Sorry,” Trudy says, sitting up. He drops his hands to her bare knees, a silent request that she stay where she is. She's flushed, breathing a little too deliberately even. “Sorry,” she repeats, running a hand through her hair. “I swear, I don't normally go jumping people's bones on the first date. I, uh ...have no idea what is normal speed anymore.”

“Hey, it's okay,” Norm says, a little taken back by how fast her words are. For the first time, it strikes him that she might actually be nervous. Perhaps oddly, that makes him feel better – at least he's not the only one. “It's, uh, not exactly like I've um, got a lot of experience here, either.”

“My main ex was a chick, anyway,” Trudy says with a quick grin.

“-Right, I didn't of think of that.”

She laughs. “Went with a guy, though. Before. I'm not a _complete_ novice when it comes to straight sex.”

He really doesn't think she had to do that... _thing_ with her hips and pelvis that she just did, a shifting and a slight grinding of weight against him, right _there_...but hell if he is complaining. “I wasn't thinking, I didn't, uh.”

Her expression is more serious now, and she leans forward, hands either side of his shoulders so she can look him straight in the eye. “Do you want me to stop-stop, as in, get off and-”

“No.” God no. “Just...” Norm lifts a hand, runs the back of it down her arm. “Slow.”

“Okay,” Trudy says, and her smile is slow and sweet and somehow so very, very wicked. “Not in a war. I can do slow.”

He doesn't have time to ask what she means by the comment about war because she's kissing him again. Slow, like he'd asked. Slow and sweet and M-rated, R-rated, and he really doesn't get why there is this thing about guys always being in charge, in control. Trudy's more confident in this, and frankly it's more than just a _pleasure_ to submit, surrender; it's a desire. It doesn't matter that his hands are starting to wander while hers are still, supporting her weight; he asks and she says 'yes'; he asks, and it's all in her hands.

For now, at least, he's entirely hers.


	6. No War Here

Norm wakes up in an unfamiliar bed that isn't moving. It doesn't smell like the _Providence_ , either. It smells like land, and city, and sex, all of which make sense. He's missing a Marine out of the picture, but that's okay. Gives him time to get his bearings.

The time on the clock says six twenty-four, which means he got maybe five hours sleep, give or take. He can function easily on that.

Despite himself, his eyes drift towards the other bed. The bed that's been stripped of blankets and sheets and pillow, waiting for another occupant to come and make it. And there'd been another occupant – Trudy is only a lance-corporal, and according to the bitching he's overheard, the Marines don't get to sleep by themselves until they are corporals. And she'd _mentioned_ a room-mate, but...

Norm lets his eyes roam around the room. Last night, he hadn't really paid attention, because there had been Trudy and the other bed, the one he's lying in, and Trudy, and this room really is bare. Two beds, two closets, two bedstands with a clock on each, two metal boxes at the base of the beds, two desks. One window, one small TV. Nothing on the walls. Nothing on _most_ of the walls, he corrects himself; one of the walls has some posters and a board on it, and that's where all the pictures are pinned.

He gets out of Trudy's bed, finds his underwear and pants, and pulls them on before walking over to the board. There is Trudy, with friends and family, sometimes with her hair in a crew-cut and others with her hair a of black curls around her shoulders. Trudy with a motorbike, Trudy with a chopper so she hadn't been lying about that (not that he thought she was, but still, confirmation). And there is the other girl – the missing room-mate, he deduces. Brown hair, olive skin, slanted green eyes, a smile with a crooked front tooth. The centre picture is of the girl with Trudy, their arms around each other's shoulders and grinning for the . Most of the pictures of the brown-haired girl have been taken down, stacked in a pile on the desk.

“ _Don't have to worry about her_ ,” Trudy had said.

Which meant, now that Norm could think clearly, that the Marine was probably dead.

He hears the door close and whirls around. Fortunately, it's Trudy who smiles at him, not an NCO or an officer springing a surprise inspection. She's dressed for running – tank, shorts, sneakers – and from the sweat-stains, she's been doing exactly that.

“Hey. Sorry, did I scare ya?”

“No. A little.”

Her smile turns crooked and fond. “Okay,” she says. “Um, I...need to grab a shower, and then we can get outta here. Can't offer you one, though. If you don't, um. Mind?”

“It's fine,” Norm says. He's used to living on a ship by now, and before that the water-shortages of the civilian world, and he really does need some time to get the idea of Trudy wet and naked _out of his head_. They did that. Only not in the shower, because no one can afford sex in the shower unless they are obscenely rich. He means the naked and sex part. Which he is not thinking about because he is remembering it all too well, and that could be very embarrassing.

By the time she comes back – less than ten minutes – he's dressed and ready to go. Which only means, of course, leaving a Marine Corps base. Full of Marines. While he's in his Navy uniform.

Not a problem.

– –

“Well, well, well, Chacon, slumming it a little, ain't ya?” The Marine leaning in the doorway of one of the barracks rooms easily has a couple inches on Norm, which is as disconcerting as it is unusual.

“Yeah, says the guy who was bangin' one of the Air Force techs, Wills,” Trudy says with a smirk, casually flipping 'Wills' the bird.

“Hey, I didn't bring him here.”

“Because you're a coward,” Trudy retorts, as someone from another doorway goes 'ooooh'. “ _Air Force_.”

“ _Navy._ ” Then Wills rolls his eyes, dismisses them both with a flick of his hand as he steps back into his room and shuts the door.

“Oh, I remember you.” That's the guy who said 'oooh' before.

“Yes,” Norm says, carefully. “You pointed a gun at me.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, man,” Geary says with an easy-going smile. “It happens, you know?”

“Yeah,” Trudy says, mouth pulling to the side. “Next time it happens, I'm kicking your ass. No shooting prospective pieces of ass, okay?”

“Hey, I didn't know,” Geary says, moving out of his room to walk beside Trudy. Like most of the Marines, he's dressed in an olive-green shirt with shorts, which means Trudy in her blue and black sleeveless top stands out. Norm doesn't really want to stand out, but if Trudy is bothered, she's not showing at all. Probably not bothered, he guesses.

“Yeah, whatever, bro,” Trudy says, and then – well, Norm doesn't quite know what happens. He _thinks_ Geary feinted at Trudy, and Trudy grabbed his wrist, but he isn't sure. What he _does_ know is the result. After some scuffling that he would have characterised as serious fighting before being stuck on a ship with a battalion (or more) of Marines, Geary ends up on the floor with Trudy twisting his arm in the air while kneeling on his back.

“You're an idiot, Geary,” Trudy says, easing off him with a laugh. Yep, normal Marine behaviour, friendship-affirming and pecking order re-established.

 _At least they didn't use knives_ , he mentally adds.

“Guilty as charged,” Geary says cheerfully, picking himself up and rotating his shoulder. “Hey, you have fun.”

“Planning on it! Hey, Kennedy.”

“Morning,” the black girl mutters as she dodges Norm and Trudy and dives into a room.

“Home sweet home,” Trudy says, and grabs Norm's hand as she leads him out.

“Always like this?”

“Oh, usually we're worse,” she says cheerfully.

– –

It's while they are grabbing breakfast at the train-station arcade (having successfully left Camp Pendleton with nothing worse than a few smirks and comments) that Norm notices the movie poster.

“ _Romeo and Juliet_ as...Velociraptors.”

“Wait, what?” Trudy says, laughing as she twists around in her seat. “Oh, _man_ , seriously?”

“No, no, it works, see? 'Two species, both alike in carnivorisity-”

“Norm! No, stop it,” she says, pressing her hands to her eyes as she laughs. But Norm is on a roll – and he loves the way she laughs.

“-in fair dystopia where we lay our scene. From ancient blood re-fused to new...mutant-y.” Okay, so, the roll rapidly rolled out.

“Mutant-y? _Mutant-y?_ ” Trudy manages to swallow her laughter to a giggle.“You do realise we have to see this now, right?”

He grins back at her. “Absolutely.”

– –

It's a surreal, whimsical movie, with rather more thought put into it than its premise would initially suggest. It also doesn't pull its punches as far as the emotional underpinning is considered, and the dying Mercutio's scream of 'a plague on both your houses!' echoes through a theatre holding its collective breath. In the silence, he can _just_ hear Trudy draw in a shaky breath and let it out, more shaky. Glancing at her, her eyes are close, hands in fists.

“You okay?” he asks, leaning over to say it directly in her ear.

“'m fine,” she says. He doesn't quite believe her, but Trudy flashes him a smile. Not too much later, he hears her laugh softly, but once the movie is over and the lights are slowing returning, it's easy to see the tracks of tears down her face.

“Trudy?”

“I...just need to get away from the crowd.”

He hesitates, and then nods. “Okay, weren't there some balconies around the foyer?”

“Perfect. Good.” She takes a deep breath, waits for the crowd to thin out (and she's nervous, off-balance enough, that he doesn't know if he should say anything, so he doesn't), and then very carefully gets up and walks out. He follows, careful not to crowd her.

They go up another story of the theatre complex, and she walks over to the corner of the balcony, right where it narrows to nothing around the curve of the wall. The balcony overlooks the foyer, and still has an excellent view through the giant glass window that marks the entrance of the building. Through glass is the glory of the urbanised area, buildings shining in what sun manages to penetrate the clouds, the bustle of tiny people moving about the various levels of causeways above the ground streets, construction work with cranes and AMP suits. Even some off in the distance.

Trudy sits down on the carpet, curling up in the corner of the balcony and folds her arms against the railing. For a long moment, she just leans forward with her head resting on her arms, breathing all too steadily. And Norm just keeps the silence, sitting a little distance from her in case she needs to the space. Sometimes, he watches the view; mostly, he keeps an eye on her.

“I'm not okay,” Trudy says at last, still not looking at him.

“I guessed.” He forces his hands to remain still on his knees. “Your room-mate?”

“Hel-V. Helga Vimoto, so, you know. Hel, and then a 'V'. She's dead.” Trudy twists her head to face him, gives him a tight smile as she leans back against the wall. “Bullet hit her pelvis, just...just below her armour. We were pinned down, couldn't get a medevac. Bled out. She just...” Trudy's hand briefly moves through the air before falling down. “Bled out. Nothin' we could do. The report said she died well.”

“Do they normally say that?” he asks quietly. He has a moment to kick himself over voicing the cynicism before her smile flashes to something real.

“Yeah.” Then her mouth just twists. “But I mean, what the fuck is dying _well_. She was pissed off. Scared and in pain and pissed off.” Roughly, Trudy knuckles her eyes, pressing her hands against them in effort to stop them crying. “Like Mercutio, you know. That's what set me off. Which makes no fucking sense, I'm fine with goddamn Boromir turning into a pin-cushion, but a dinosaur dies and I go to pieces.”

“You seem to be holding yourself together pretty well to me,” he says, and she glances at him sharply before sighing.

“Yeah, I don't...”

“Hey,” Norm says, reaching out to run his hand gently down her arm. She smiles slightly, and then leans over to kiss him.

“I'll...I'll be okay,” she says. “Just hits me, sometimes. Which is damn annoying,” she adds with a watery laugh, “because I was actually enjoying that movie. Ah, fuck.” She presses her palms to her eyes, takes in a few deep breaths.

He watches her for a moment, and then reaches up to run his hand down her arm again. “Need somewhere quiet?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if you're up to going to San Diego, I hear the main library there is pretty cool.”

Trudy grins at him, a weak version of her normal delighted expression but close enough that he smiles back.

“Yeah. I think a library sounds awesome right about now.”

– –

The that they go to is situated right in the heart of the old city, a building constructed around a hundred years ago with all the wide-open spaces that went with the architecture back then. There is even a courtyard in the middle, with a glass roof, couches, and plants. It's there that they end up, although 'end up' implies a certain lack of direction on their part. More accurately, it's where Trudy makes a beeline for once she has a book in hand while he heads off to the computers for a couple of hours before joining her.

He knows what this is – a fling while they are both on shore – and knows that that is why they tumbled into bed so quickly, but still, space is wonderful. Space, and quiet, is also a damn luxury now, and he fully intends on enjoying it.

“Hey,” Norm says once he joins Trudy on the couch she's claimed.

“Hey yourself,” she says, grinning at him with no trace of her earlier grief.

“Got a message from Chang,” he says, moving her feet so he can sit down. Her feet move straight back onto his lap with all the casual possessiveness of a cat ( _this is my couch, but you may be allowed to share_ ).

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, bunch of us from the _Prov_ are gathering at a bar later.”

“Okay.”

“Want to join in?”

Trudy pauses, glances over the top of her book (title in Spanish, a steampunk-style airship with sails on the cover). “You're not sick of me yet?”

“Not even slightly,” he says with a quick grin. She grins back.

“Sure thing, you got yourself a date.”

– –

“OI, SPELLMAN, OVER HERE!” Chang calls out over the crowded bar, and Trudy and Norm navigate their way across to the table where the _Providence_ 's techs have set up.

“Marines allowed, or this a Navy-only corner?” Trudy asks, and Chang makes a show of sighing.

“We'll make an exception in your case.”

“Charmed,” Trudy says, and promptly claims Norm's lap as a chair. Hell if he's going to complain. But before they can get comfortable, Chang continues.

“As long as you get the drinks,” he says, with a wicked grin.

“Hah! Knew it,” Trudy laughs, jumping back up again. While she's gone, Chang leans forward.

“Please, please tell me that you've been banging her, Spellman. Please. It'd be such a waste if you haven't been.”

Norm eyes him, and grins. Watson whistles appreciatively, prompting a, “We've been doing other things, too.”

“Sure,” Watson says, rolling her eyes. “At least _someone_ is getting some.”

“...if you decide to live vicariously through me, I'm going to be really disturbed over here,” Norm says, slowly, and the group of them just laugh. As the time passes, Norm ends up half-listening to the group, and half watching the crowd. Most of the clientele seem to be military – lots of uniforms, lots of crew-cuts. For the first time since leaving the _Providence_ , Norm fits right in, which amuses him maybe more than it should. The crowd, too, is full of people laughing and drinking and dancing and determined to enjoy themselves after a tour, or during a tour, or before a tour. There is something greedy about them, he realises, and when Trudy gets up and dives off into crowd to dance, he also realises that she's got the same air about her. That greediness, but he doesn't think it's a bad thing, exactly. It's just that Trudy, and the others, are too aware of their own mortality _not_ to want to grab life and dance with it.

How, though, Trudy manages to drag _him_ onto the dance-floor, Norm doesn't think he'll ever understand.

– –

This time they end up in a hotel, a fact they take advantage of. Hotels mean bigger beds, and normally far more comfortable beds than the military-issue beds of a barracks at that. He's drunk just enough that his inhibitions are lowered, so that when she grabs his shirt and pulls him closer, he just kisses her back without over-thinking it. Without over-thinking it too much: greedy kisses, matching the heightened lust for life he'd noted earlier. But mostly, he just concentrates on what he can do so that Trudy makes that sound again, on what makes her dig her blunt nails in his shoulder and pull him closer, closer, closer.

– –

“I was thinking,” Trudy says in the morning. They are sprawled out over the bed at the shockingly decadent hour of seven in the morning, and he's tracing the tattoo down her spine. Her battalion's motto, 'second to none', written in graceful capital letters from the nape of her neck down to below her hips. She has another tattoo, too, a yellow seahorse banded with white and orange above her right ankle. He hasn't gotten around to asking her what it means.

“Always dangerous, but sure?”

She wriggles just enough to be able to throw a pillow at him. “Idiot,” she says, affectionately. “What I was _thinking_ was I'm headin' back up to New Jersey in a couple of days, you know, spend time with the family before I'm back on duty. And, uh, I know you're back on your ship, but I was thinking...do you want keep in touch? Just, you know, over email. As friends.”

 _Friends_ gets a bit of a twist, because he wants...he wants more than that. But he's also practical enough to appreciate the offer for what it is.

“Works for me. Although, you know, the delay time between emails might be impressive.”

“Eh, duty is duty,” Trudy says, and then pushes herself up in order to kiss him. “I'll email you when I get a chance, once I work out which of mine is still working, okay?”

“...that will be fun,” he says, tone wry.

“Yeah, tell me about.” Another kiss, and this time, he kisses her back, his hands sliding down her body to rest on her hips.

Right. Yes. Friends, when the girl can make him stupid with lust. But she also geeks out about Lord of the Rings and dwarves and , and Norm thinks that it's worth a shot.

– –

Back on the _Providence_ , it takes Norm another two days to find the time to check his personal email. He also spent those two days alternating between wanting to read her email in order to keep in touch, and a certainty that she'd have forgotten, or changed her mind, or-

What he finds, when he finally opens his email, is the following message:

 **to:** “Seaman Norman V. Spellman” nvspellman33 @ usn. us. gov  
 **from:** “TMC” escolasticademoira @ cibertejido . com  
 **subject:** IS TRUDY!

Hey Norm!

Just making sure this is the right address – if so, THEN I'll babble at you! While we have time anyway. And I forgot my password for my USMC email, hope the civvie one gets through.

And hope the computers aren't still giving you a hard time!

– Trudy

Norm grins, and starts typing his reply.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While the concept of _Romeo and Juliet_ as Velociraptors is my own, the 'two species, both alike in carnivorisity' bit came from the brain of my friend, Gabby


	7. Correspondence

_June-December, 2135  
cyberspace_

 **to:** “Seaman Norman V. Spellman” nvspellman33 @ usn.us.gov  
 **from:** “Midshipman Gertrude M. Chacon” CHA35004218 @ usna.us.gov.edu  
 **subject:** ahoy (from trudy at her shiny new address)

Heyhey!

Apparently USNA manages to successfully block most non-academy email addresses, so thought I should use this one instead of my old one until I suss out the scene. Not that I'll have as much time as I used to, given school. Which I'm actually excited about. _I get to study history! And aerial engineering!_ Would have loved a class on botany, but I'll deal. (I keep thinking that maybe, if I do this for ten or so years, I could possibly poke at botany again. Did I tell you I nearly managed to score a place studying it? Nearly. But wasn't enough money in the scholarship, didn't feel like prostituting myself on the side to pay the bills, the paternal side of my genetics refused to pitch in, yadda yadda _yadda._ )

And! I forgot to ask – how are you? Still on the _Providence?_ On leave? On some other ship in the Classified Ocean? If still on the _Prov_ , tell Chang hi for me.

I've been reading up on just what, exactly, I've inflicted upon myself at USNA. Apparently there is this thing called 'Plebe Summer' and I'll just quote from it:

 _All midshipmen begin the four-year program with Plebe Summer,  
a period designed to turn civilians into midshipmen. Plebe Summer   
is no gentle easing into the military routine. Soon after entering the   
gate on Induction Day, you are put into uniform and taught how to   
salute by the first class midshipmen and officers who lead the plebe  
indoctrination program. For the next seven weeks, you start your days   
at dawn with an hour of rigorous exercise and end them long after sunset,  
wondering how you will make it through the next day._

 ** _Seven. Weeks._** Oh, the poor _babies_. Marine bootcamp was thirteen, bitches. I think this explains _so much_ about the enlightened idiots who lead us. Half-tempted to see if I can skip due to the whole 'enlisted and been to combat' thing but suspect I'll just be told to shove it. But I know how to salute, _thank you._ And then it goes on about learning how to shoot and I've just remembered I'm going to be surrounded by eighteen year olds who think being an officer is a good idea. And that _**I**_ thought this was a good idea.

I think I had too much concussion over in the M.E. and Angola. Why did I do this again?

yours in sincere confusion,  
Trudy

p.s. on reflection, this email is exceedingly whiny. My bad.

 

 **to:** “Midshipman Gertrude M. Chacon” CHA35004218 @ usna.gov.edu.us   
**from:** “Seaman Norman V. Spellman” nvspellman33 @ usn.gov.us  
 **subject:** re:ahoy (from trudy at her shiny new address)

Hey yourself.

I'm not sure if I should remind you that _you_ are going to become one of those enlightened idiots who lead us? Unless, of course, pilots are in a special category to the rest of the officers. Wouldn't surprise me, they don't seem to do much actual leading (no offence). And, well, you won't be leading me, obviously, as I will hopefully be out of uniform and in the safe, secure, poverty-striken reefs of academia by the time you graduate.

And I think under the circumstances, a little whining is okay. Just a little. Otherwise I'll start to think you've turned all officer on me ;)

I'm between ships at the moment. I have a glorious month to do absolutely nothing at all except read and sleep and read some more, and then I'll be posted onto the _Iwo Jima_. But I've passed on your greetings to Chang anyway (he says to marry him, but he says that to everyone, so I wouldn't take it personally).

Hey, where are you in the world exactly? At Portsmouth at the moment, but if you were somewhere near, we could catch up? And when does your Plebeian Summer (interesting name) start?

\- Norm

 **to:** “Seaman Norman V. Spellman” nvspellman33 @ usn.us.gov  
 **from:** “Midshipman Gertrude M. Chacon” CHA35004218 @ usna.us.gov.edu  
 **subject:** re: ahoy (from trudy at her shiny new address)

Greetings from the bowels of the Universidad de Lima.

We regret to inform you that as we are currently in Peru (date varies according to what I'm doing, but I was last seen somewhere around the 500s CE) we will have to decline your invitation until such time as the fates are smiling on us. I'm sorry. I have a statue of the Moche's Spider-god grinning at me as I type & it's doing weird things to my brain. Not that I really mind, the Moche are my favourite civilization, _ever_. They knew how to party and I love their style of art. Also, bonus points for having sexually explicit pottery - there is this vase thing that I unpacked this morning all about fellatio (oh, and there was another all about cunnilingus. See why I like them? Cultures so often can all be yay about the first, but when it comes for going down on the chick? Forget it. So the Moche being all yay oral sex for women is awesome). Sad about the whole climate-change thing raining on their parade (or rather _not_ raining, then flooding, as the case happened to be).

Okay, I cave: I'm spending time with my dad, sorta. I can generally put up with him if I haven't seen him for a couple of years. And I love being in Lima – it's just such a wonderful city. It's _my_ city in a lot of ways, which is kinda odd as I always think of Dallas as being 'home'. But I get homesick for Lima and I just feel better for living here. The city has such soul, which not a lot of places really do, I don't think.

Then again, usually when I'm going to places _outside_ the US and Peru, it was in uniform and I had a rifle in my hands. Doesn't help with getting the feel of a place!

 _Anyway_. Thank you for reading my whining. I'm better now. A bit. :P It'll all be worth it to fly. And if I stick around long enough to have a say in some executive decisions, all the more good. Plebe Summer starts July 1st and HAH. You're right, it is an interesting name. The Patricians struck down to be nothing more than mere Plebes, serving the plebes, stripped of all rank and pretty hair. I wonder where the hell they got the name from.

And hey, a month off is _awesome_ – what are you reading? And what are you planning to do once you are a little scholar-fish? And I was going to say something else, but I can hear Dad arguing with someone down the hallway about the freaking Na'vi so I've lost my train of thought. Bah.

hope to hear (read?) from you soon,  
Trudy

 

 **to:** “Midshipman Gertrude M. Chacon” CHA35004218 @ usna.gov.edu.us   
**from:** “Seaman Norman V. Spellman” nvspellman33 @ usn.gov.us  
 **subject:** re:ahoy (from trudy at her shiny new address)

Alas. Your humble servant will have to petition you another time.

I have to admit that I've never heard about the Moche before, but they sound pretty cool. (And just curious, when you use CE, do you mean Common Era or Christian Era?)

I'm reading _Atlantis Revisited: Essays on the Sunken Island_ which, like it suggests on the box, is a collection of essays about the various ideas and theories about what Atlantis is, was, might be, and function in culture. It's...way more interesting than my summary.

As for being a scholar-fish, I haven't quite decided yet – either linguistics or anthropology, or some combination thereof.

Should I ask what the Na'vi argument was about?

\- Norm

 **to:** “Seaman Norman V. Spellman” nvspellman33 @ usn.us.gov  
 **from:** “Midshipman Gertrude M. Chacon” CHA35004218 @ usna.us.gov.edu  
 **subject:** re: ahoy (from trudy at her shiny new address)

Our Divine Highness would love any and all future petitions! :)

(and yeah, sorry about the lag – actually _had_ Plebe Week, now at USNA, busy busy busy little ant I am now)

I get torn between Christian Era and Common. Christian is way more accurate, even if the dating is Common. But it's only common because of the spread of Christianity, and then thanks to Spanish, British and American globalization, so it's still decidedly Western/Christian. But what else are we going to use? At least it's less depressing than the moves by the more extreme environmentalists to start dating things according to the Anthropocene – the Era Where Humans Fucked With the Climate. They usually put the start of it in 1998 as a clear boundary, thanks to Hurricane Mitch sweeping most of Honduras into the ocean. Not that I think they are _wrong_ , just that using a dating system that uses a disaster and massive loss of human life as its starting point seems rather morbid. Because seriously, we get it. The Earth is fucked up. _We know. We live here_. It's not like we live on Mars, and speaking of dates, have you heard about the Martian push to change their dating system over to something more Martian? Of course, that camp is then split between the 'first landing of robots', 'first landing of people', 'formation of the United Martian Union'. I have no idea if they'll end up deciding anything, but the argument's been fascinating to watch (when, you know, I have that mythic thing called _free time._ )

Re: Atlantis, that actually sounds really cool, what theories and things are they talking about? I know that most scholars place the explosion at Thera, and that there were some wacky theories about the Atlantic Ocean and connections to South America and the land Mu, but apart from that, most of what I know is due to the Fantasia210 plot where they visit Atlantis! And I love the show, but sometimes I have to go 'la, la, la, alternate universe is alternate' when they mess about with mythologies and legends I actually know anything about. Ah, show.

As for the bitching about the Na'vi: Dad's an archaeologist, concentrating on Latin America (and within that whatever he feels like at that moment in time – I come by the varied nature of my interests honestly). And it's become the fashion to try and link the Na'vi and their culture into as many things as the students can manage. It drives Dad _insane_. Not that this takes much as he's a very highly-strung person, but in this I agree with him. What in the name of history and anthropology do the (STONE) ruins (OF BUILDINGS) at Caral have to do with a culture that lives in trees? (beyond the possible link of not-farming, but Caral was based on maritime resources, which is _completely_ different from living in a jungle. Jungles were/are actually pretty crap places to set up shop, the nutrients in the soil got/get drained very quickly, as far as I remember. _Anyway_.)

I can see that, anthropology and linguistics. Based on my Vast Experience As An Academic Brat, you understand. Also that long conversation on the _Prov_ where you proceeded to _break my **brain**_ with Ancient Greek language. I say go for it, I think it'd really suit you. And one of us has to be sane enough to ditch wearing a uniform ;)

Trudy

 **to:** “Midshipman Gertrude M. Chacon” CHA35004218 @ usna.gov.edu.us   
**from:** “Seaman Norman V. Spellman” nvspellman33 @ usn.gov.us  
 **subject:** re: ahoy (from trudy at her shiny new address)

As you can see from my own lag, lagging is all good (besides, we've been lagging on our emails for months and months, I think it's fine :D )

Actually, I hadn't heard about the Martians debating dating systems, but honestly, it wouldn't surprise me. They do seem a people who are rather enamoured with their own independence. As much as any country (or...however you define the settlements on Mars. It _is_ classified as a country, isn't it?) _can_ be independent.

Atlantis is complicated! Because, yes, the main source of inspiration for it was most likely the explosion at Thera (and the geography even matches, with the island within an island) and the Minoan civilization, _but_ it's a little more complicated than that. If you actually look at the _timing_ that Plato placed Atlantis at the end of the last Ice Age, when the seas were rising, and ice-caps melting, and all kinds of things happening with volcanoes and earthquakes. In addition, there are ruins under the sea which roughly date back to the same time (something to do with geologists calculating the amount of sea-level rise, I believe), across the globe. Then you have _all_ of the flood traditions, which also tie back in with Noah's Arc, and also the Ancient Sumerians who have detailed histories both pre-Flood and post, not to mention that world-swallowing oceans are found everywhere in people's mythology. The main trouble is that we (general 'we' here) tend to regard our ancestors as stupid and superstitious. I won't argue about the latter (but let's face it, every culture has their superstitions), but the former is just insulting and elitist, even if it does make people feel better about themselves and the supposed Road to Enlightenment we're all apparently stuck on (following some Piper, I guess). So, historians and archaeologists used to believe that the idea of global sea-level rising was absurd, that our long-dead ancestors were just making it up (getting confused with a local river rising, or it was symbolic of something), etc etc...

Of course, _now_ , we know that the seas can and will rise on a global scale, and can drown countries, so the idea really isn't so absurd at all. So, I think Plato's using two different traditions, as well as just plain creating up to suit his own ends. So, the book of essays is all just gathering...well, theories and ideas, and it's really interesting.

Yeah, Fan210 is a bit like that. But then they have plots like trying to track down Baba Yaga, and get it as right as you can, and I forgive them. Still, I think if we could all pretend that the episode where Merlin and Nimue were the same person didn't happen, it'd be a very good thing. Brilliant idea. _Terrible_ execution.

Ahhhh, I gotcha on the Na'vi. Yes, that would be incredibly annoying. That...yeah, I think I'm with you and your dad there. I _do_ find them utterly fascinating, but part of that is that they _aren't_ human. We can't really use them to prove what people keep trying to do – different species, different environment, even though there are very intriguing similarities to certain human times and cultures and places. But they are different. And I think it's important to know that.

I mean, I know you know that, and I'm preaching to the choir, but I guess I hadn't really put that into words before. So, heh, I guess thank you for that.

Still kind of want to end up in xenoanthropology, though. If nothing else, it's still a brand new field. And I may admit to being at least slightly ambitious.

\- Norm

 **to:** “Midshipman Gertrude M. Chacon” CHA35004218 @ usna.gov.edu.us   
**from:** “Seaman Norman V. Spellman” nvspellman33 @ usn.gov.us  
 **subject:** heard about your old battalion

Hey, Trudy, I heard about what happened to your old battalion. I'm so, so sorry.

How are you holding up?

 **to:** “Seaman Norman V. Spellman” nvspellman33 @ usn.us.gov  
 **from:** “Midshipman Gertrude M. Chacon” CHA35004218 @ usna.us.gov.edu  
 **subject:** re: heard about your old battalion

I...

I don't even know. Seriously, I don't. If I was with them I'd know how to react. But I was pulling an all-nighter on my stupid engineering prac while they were being slaughtered.

I don't know.

 **to:** “Seaman Norman V. Spellman” nvspellman33 @ usn.us.gov  
 **from:** “Midshipman Gertrude M. Chacon” CHA35004218 @ usna.us.gov.edu  
 **subject:** re: heard about your old battalion

Actually yeah, I _do_ know how I'm reacting: I wish I had been there with them. And before you mention it yes, _I know_ , I would probably have been killed with the rest of my battalion. But they were mine. And I ditched them to what? Go to school? Be saluted and called ma'am? _Fly?_

From where I'm sitting right now, it just doesn't seem worth it. Not if I could have done some good over there.

 **to:** “Midshipman Gertrude M. Chacon” CHA35004218 @ usna.gov.edu.us   
**from:** “Seaman Norman V. Spellman” nvspellman33 @ usn.gov.us  
 **subject:** re: heard about your old battalion

Trudy,

I have no idea if this will help (at least, I _really_ hope it won't hurt, and I'm writing this because it's been a week since I got your last email, and hopefully the initial shock has passed and I'm not being inappropriate), but...you did two years with them. You stood with them, you helped – I mean, I distinctly remember walking into a restaurant with you where you'd pulled the owner's son from a burning truck. You saved his life.

And then you turned around and signed up for another nine years of service before your first four were over. You didn't leave them to go pursue your own thing, you left so when you came back, you could still serve, still help, still stand with them.

I hope this helps, even if I suspect it won't. The first ship I served on, when I was transferred to the _Prov_ , barely a fortnight later we received word that she'd been sunk. Most of the crew survived. And even though I hadn't been on her long, I still kept thinking that maybe if I'd been there, I would have managed to work fast enough to bring the systems back up, and she wouldn't have sunk at all. And the people who died would still be alive. And I still sometimes think that. So, I'm not _entirely_ speaking out of my ass, I do get a bit of what you're going through (a _bit_ ).

And...I think you're going to be a damn good officer. You care. You get it. You've come from the enlisted ranks, you _know_ what it's like. And you still have all that honor and sense of duty, only you're not doing it out of some sense of duty for a name or an image, you're doing it out of duty for all the men and women you serve with. And you _know_ what that means in a way that all those 18yo kids around you don't. And if you want to fly, that doesn't mean you've made a bad choice just because you have a talent and a desire for you. You decided not to split, but stay for another _nine years._

That's not the mark of someone selfish or self-serving. And just...hang in there, okay, Trudy? It'll get better, eventually.

\- Norm

 **to:** “Seaman Norman V. Spellman” nvspellman33 @ usn.us.gov  
 **from:** “Midshipman Gertrude M. Chacon” CHA35004218 @ usna.us.gov.edu  
 **subject:** I think I live

Okay, I'm...dealing better now. I would just say 'better', but I've got the flu or something, and physically I feel like utter shit. But with the...all the other stuff. One of the chaplains verbally head-slapped some sense and sanity into me ('No, Chacon, being self-destructive will _not_ do anything to either bring them back or make you feel less guilty. It's certainly not honoring them'. Which may sound strange in text, but it worked in person. I mean, I know you were trying to say something similar, but I really wasn't in the frame of mind to listen) and then I have to haul academic ass to pull myself out of the hole I've fallen into, but yeah.

Also?

Never.

Getting.

Drunk.

Ever.

 _Again._

I think I'm a long way from 'okay', but I'm getting better. And thank fuck Christmas is coming up. Which means vacation. Also means New Year's is just around the corner. Which is outstanding because honestly?

2135 _sucked_. And is fired. Exorcised. Shot in the head with a silver bullet.

Here's to 2136 being better!  
Trudy

 **to:** “Midshipman Gertrude M. Chacon” CHA35004218 @ usna.gov.edu.us   
**from:** “Seaman Norman V. Spellman” nvspellman33 @ usn.gov.us  
 **subject:** re: I think I live

Hey, I'm really, really relieved to hear a) from you and b) that you are getting better. I was worried about you.

And yeah, I'd agree that 2135 is fired (also, maybe, fried?). You get the stake and the bullets, I'll break out the Latin dictionary. I'm sure if we put our heads together, we could exorcise any ghost/vampire/demon (the zombies I'll leave to your very capable hands).

Seriously, though, it's really good to hear from you.

And if I don't get to reply for a few weeks, Merry Christmas, Trudy. May 2136 be a hell of a lot better.

\- Norm


	8. Casualties of War

_March, 2136  
Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean_

 

“Wait, oh, that's not good,” Norm mutters as his screen goes black. Whereas once before he would have initially frozen, taken his fingers off the keyboard, now he just pauses for a fraction of a moment before trying to get the screen back. “Anyone else lose their screens?”

“Shit, yes,” Ramsey says, and she's echoed by the rest of the room. As she starts to talk on the back-up comms, Norm takes a deep breath, flexes his fingers, and gets to work. If the systems don't come back on in another thirty seconds, the whole ship will go onto alert; two minutes, and it's Code Red. The sound of the alerts are annoying, but despite the bitching, no one ever forgets what would happen if the alarm wasn't false.

“We can't talk to the rest of the task-group,” Ramsey says to the room after what seems an age and no time at all, voice even. “Okay, people, we gotta move it. I want those systems up five minutes ago.”

The two minute mark passes, and the alarms start.

Three minutes.

Four minutes.

Four minutes, seventeen seconds, and Sadiq whoops. “I got life! C'mon, baby, talk to me,” he croons to his screen.

Four minutes, thirty-five seconds, and the floor suddenly bucks up and down, making their chairs violently slide across the floor. Even as they slide, the sailors grab their ears in a desperate attempt to protect them against the sound that rips through the _Iwo Jima_. The floor should settle down, Norm knows from experience. But this time it doesn't. The floor sways this way and that, bobbing like they are on a tug-boat instead of a cruiser.

It takes him what seems like an eternity to realise that it's not ringing in his ears that he is hearing, but the siren shrieking out the order to abandon ship. Ramsey hauls herself to her feet. “You heard the order,” she says, expression stark. “Let's move.”

Out in the corridor, the screaming whine of the engines is louder. Loud enough that it's nearly all he can hear as Norm runs with the others. Up the ladder, down another corridor, moving as fast as they can given the smoke, given the panic underlying everything because the floor is at an angle and he really can't tell if that angle is getting worse or not.

Ships can sink in minutes, Norm knows that. He knows that, and as the floor becomes increasingly hot under his boots, he backtracks to help pull Grady up from where she is sitting stunned in a doorway. She's cradling her arm and he thinks she screams as he hauls her to her feet, but all he can hear is the engines. Half-dragging the mechanic, half-running, Norm manages to reach the deck, only to end up going from the borderline chaos to the full-on chaos topside.

There is smoke everywhere, people running this way and that across the visibly tilted deck in no easily definable pattern. And there is shouting, so much shouting, which sure as hell isn't helping. Grady, seemingly coming alive under the same sensory onslaught that is making him freeze, turns and yells, “This way,” in his ear. Norm follows her as close as he can, follows her to the edge of the ship where they are hauling down the lifeboats, but then someone shoves into him hard enough that he tumbles to the steal deck.

Desperately, Norm tries to stop himself, but the deck is tilted enough that his momentum sends him rolling towards the edge without enough time for him to stop, without anything for him to grab and hang on to.

He doesn't have the breath to scream as he falls over the edge.

Nor does he have enough time to pull his limbs together before he hits the water. His arm slams into a piece of floating wreckage, and the white-hot pain completely overrides the sensory capabilities of his brain. He isn't aware of the desperation of his fellow sailors around him, or even aware of the water. He can't _breathe_ it hurts so much.

But he can't die _here_.

Not here, not now.

He still has to finish reading his book on the origins of language. He still has to finish that post to his blog on Navy slang he's been meaning to do for a month. He still owes his sister an email. He hasn't even managed to set one _foot_ into any university as a student, with all that knowledge to learn and books to read and things to discuss and he can't, he can't, he can't, he _can't_ –

But he's too far under the water, the water is cold, so cold, cold enough that he wants to scream and run but he can't move, can't scream. He can't breathe anything but water and it's so **cold** -

Someone grabs him and hauls him up to the surface.

“Goddammit, Spellman, don't you fucking drown on me,” his rescuer swears at him. Janacek, that's Janacek, Janacek with her arm around him, Janacek who is letting him go so now he has to tread water by himself. And breathe, and breathe.

“Thank you,” he manages to gasp out.

“Don't drown, then thank me,” the lieutenant snaps. “Swim away from the ship as fast as you can. You gotta get at least two hundred yards. That's a fucking order, you hear me?”

“Yesma'am.”

She doesn't waste her breath on saying anything further, just nods and then swims back towards the seething mass of thrashing bodies to rescue someone else. As soon as his breathing is somewhat even, Norm starts swimming as fast as he can, given the sickening pain radiating out from his broken arm.

Two hundred yards. He has to get at least two hundred yards away before the ship finishes sinking. Behind him, all around him, all he can hear is the lap of water and screaming. Screams of pain, screams for help, screamed orders about...something. Norm looks back to see if he can make sense of it, but all he can see behind him is chaos. He can see heads, mostly but not always attached to bodies, and bodies, most moving but some not. He can see pieces of metal and other debris, he can see fire and the dark slick of oil as the ship bleeds out. And he can see the _Iwo Jima_ , listing in the water.

Half the _Iwo Jima_.

Norm shakes his head, blinks. But his mind can't make sense of what he is seeing, so he dismisses it and keeps swimming. But he can't keep warm. The water is far, far too fucking cold for anything as luxurious as _warmth_. Somewhere, part of his mind is saying that he has to get out of the water, has to get warm, but he tries to ignore it. As long as he keeps moving, he'll be okay. He'll be okay.

As long as he keeps moving.

“SPELLMAN!”

His name. Someone is screaming _his_ name. That's important.

“OI, SPELLMAN, OVER HERE!”

A hand, a living hand, appears in front of him, and he reaches up to take it . Other hands – also living – reach forward to haul him into the lifeboat. They jostle his arm, and he tries to scream, but his throat has forgotten how to work.

“Easy, easy, we got you,” Zubrzycki says, and when Norm lurches to the side of the boat to start retching, Escobar holds him to stop him from falling back into the water. Lifting his head as soon as his body lets him, Norm freezes when he catches sight of the _Iwo Jima_.

“What-?” he manages.

“Yeah,” Escobar says, and that's all he has to. The _Iwo Jima_ has been broken in two, the rear end bobbing vertically in the water. The other half, the half he'd been in and tumbled off, is starting to tilt up itself, the front rising out of the water. But because it'd been listing to start with, the rise is twisted, off-kilter, and Norm can't do anything but watch in horrified fascination as the remains of the ship falls to the side, crushing those caught beneath.

“When she finishes sinking,” Zubrzycki says after a long, awful moment, his voice blank, “we'll go back in and pick up the wounded.”

“If they don't come to us,” Carlisle pipes up. Norm hadn't even noticed her, but frankly, he barely knows anyone on the boat besides Escobar. With nothing to do and his body starting to shake, he shuts his eyes, huddles in on himself, and starts to go over linguistics terminology in an effort to distract himself from the excruciating pain coming from his arm.

– –

Later, he's told that it took just over three hours for the survivors of the USS _Iwo Jima_ to be pulled out of the water by one of the other ships in the task-group. What is _left_ of the task-group, because three quarters of the ships were either crippled or lost entirely in the attack. But it's only later that he's told this, because he doesn't remember much of the aftermath of the attack at all.

He remembers the cold, he remembers the pain, he remembers some of the crew – wounded only, and the training has kicked back in so the survivors are good about that – who are hauled into the lifeboat with him.

He remembers Carlisle going, “Oh, hell, Grady,” and him twisting his head to try and see, and he remembers Grady floating on her back in the water, staring up at the sky with eyes that never, ever blink.

He remembers being unable to get the taste of the ocean out of his mouth. Even on the USS _Kitty Hawk_ , even given fresh water to drink and shot up with painkillers, all he can taste is saltwater that tastes like blood.

He remembers thinking that the _Kitty Hawk_ is a good thing. That's what they were protecting, the _Kitty Hawk_. If she's around, they did their job, so he says to no one in particular, “Well, at least that went right.”

He thinks he remembers someone telling him to shut the fuck up so he wouldn't jinx them already, or maybe he tells himself that. He can't remember.

– –

It's beyond cliché to wake up and not have the slightest idea of where you are, but there you have it. Norm wakes up with his mind somewhere between fuzzy and clear, and he hasn't got the slightest idea where the hell he is.

Hospital. Hospital is good. He thinks. The last thing he really, truly remembers is begging the medics not to cut off his arm, and the thought of that makes him try and sit up, try and see if he's still got it, because he can move his fingers, but that could just be his imagination, only there is his left arm. In a cast, but there.

“Norm! Try not to move too much, um, you might-”

“...Dad?”

Reece smiles, but the relief in his expression does nothing to hide just how terrible the man looks. Exhausted, with deep, dark circles under his eyes like bruises, collar askew, struggling to unslump himself from the chair beside the bed. “Hey there, buddy. You okay?”

“I...don't know yet,” Norm says slowly, tone bemused. “What are you doing here? Where....okay, this is going to sound stupid, but....where are we?”

“In reverse order, VA hospital in Morehead, North Carolina, and, well, my only child takes a swan-dive off a sinking ship, I'm going to be a little concerned.”

“Yeah, um, that was, I didn't plan that, it just,” Norm says, and he can feel himself frowning as he remembers the dull thuds of someone hitting him, of him hitting the deck, and-

Reece gets to his feet, leans over, and kisses Norm's forehead. “Glad you're in one piece,” his father says, aiming for light-hearted cheer and only managing to underscore the worry and strain in his voice.

“Me, too. Um. Is Mom around?”

“She was here yesterday, but you were still sleeping off the anaesthetic. We're taking it in shifts.” His parents do get along pretty well, given they rarely see each other, but Norm can only imagine the arguing that discussion would have entailed.

“My arm-”

“Let me put it this way,” Reece says, “do you really want to know how badly you shattered your forearm?”

 _Shattered?_

“They going to be kicking me out?” he asks instead.

Reece is silent for a moment. “Yeah,” he says at last. “I think so. Only I'm pretty sure that around here, they call it an honourable discharge. No boots to asses applied.” He studies Norm's face for a moment, and sighs. “It's going to take a few operations to fix your arm, Norm. At the moment all that's holding the bone pieces together is a bunch of screws and plates. They think you'll get all the mobility back, though.”

“They _think?_ No, never mind, I can't-”

“Yeah,” Reece says moving his hands as if he were going to do...something, and settles for squeezing Norm's right shoulder instead. “Look, you just take it easy, okay? Everything will be sorted out, you don't have to deal with anything right now.”

“Okay,” Norm says, easing himself back down onto the bed. “Okay. I'll do it tomorrow.”

Tomorrow, when he'll be in a hospital in the United States. Not on a ship in the Atlantic. He won't be on a ship, because his ship sank. He lost his ship, and he just lost his job.

He really doesn't know what to think about that.

– –

Norm wakes up at 0130, plenty of time to pull on his uniform and get to his station for Rev Watch. It only takes him twisting his left arm for pain and reality to come crashing back. He falls back against the bed, gasping with the effort not to scream.

He's not on the _Iwo Jima_. He's in a VA hospital. He can't go and do his five-hour watch, because when he slammed his arm into that floating piece of wreckage, he didn't just break his arm, he shattered it.

He can't grab a cup of coffee with Grady because she's floating on the surface of the ocean, staring at the sky.

But at least it's dark in the ward, so as long as he's quiet, no one will know when he presses his hand to his eyes and starts to cry.

– –

He writes his after-action report in the morning, as required, and he keeps it bloodless and technical, also as required. _This happened_ , he writes, and then _that happened_ , and then, _I have no recollection_.

The attack had been brief, and so the after-action report is even briefer.

– –

He submits the report and gets called for a follow-up interview. Out of the information techs on-duty and trying to get the computers back, only he and Escobar are still alive. Escobar had been stationed up in the bridge, and they both get hauled in front of the committee. Yes, committee. A committee _already_. Surprise surprise, the loss of so many ships and so many personnel have proved deeply embarrassing for the Commander-in-Chief, and for the US Navy, and yeah, it's not so good for the war, either.

They tell him they need to get the sequence of events right.

They tell him they need to know how the computers reacted to the EMP blast.

They tell him they need to know exactly how long it took for his team to get the computers back, if they did.

They tell him what they need, and so he tells them. He tells them, and he tells them, and he tells them until the painkillers wear out and his temper thins.

They ask him if he can try and remember exactly what happened after the explosion, and he snaps back with, “I don't know, sir, because it sounded like a sledgehammer was being used on the side of a bucket – that was over my head. _Sir_.”

By the time they are done, Norm is shaking both from the physical pain, and the emotions that are intense enough that they are actually making it hard for him to draw breath.

– –

Here's the thing: everyone on a ship knows what General Quarters means. Battle stations, that's what it means. It means everyone runs to their station, it means that everyone pulls on helmets and life-jackets, it means that everyone does all of those things except when the computers are down. Every time the computers are down, that's GQ, only the techno-whizzes are too busy trying to get the damn computers up and running to get to any other station, too busy trying to restore power and vision to their ship that they don't have time to haul on a life-jacket. Not when those precious seconds could mean the difference between life and death of their ship and fellow sailors.

Here's the other thing: GQ happened so much on the _Iwo Jima_ thanks to computers in desperate need of a complete overhaul that no one really said 'GQ' without adding a 'BS' on the end of it.

Here's the main thing: right now, Norm's having a hard time _not_ adding 'BS' to the end of things, because it's all just a bunch of bull **shit**.

– –

Like all wars, theirs is a war of words as much as it is of weapons, and not all shots are fired at those whom politics and pride have deemed _enemy_.

In other words, the media is having a field day.

To start with, he's too out of it to do more than send around a group email to his contacts and friends, letting them know that he's not dead. But then his mother makes a comment that it might be better if he didn't catch up on the news, didn't catch up on the blogs. “You really don't want to know what they are saying, baby,” Eugenie says, like he's turning five this year instead of twenty-one.

It takes him maybe twenty minutes to work out that he really should have listened to her.

The technical theories on what happened are fine, he can deal with that. The _Iwo Jima_ snapped in half like a plastic toy because the torpedo detonated just _below_ the keel; the pressure wave of the explosion “lifted” the ship, and broke it, before the ship was hit by the explosion itself. The _Iwo Jima_ was small enough that it just snapped.

He can deal with that.

He can't deal with just about anything else.

The articles that quote numbers instead of names, the articles that pontificate on what this loss really means, as if the loss of life isn't enough damn meaning in and of itself, the articles that go on a pro-war rant, an anti-war rant, the articles that go 'well, that's what they get for singing up, no one held a gun to their heads', and the articles that decry the whole interest anyway, because the military are just a bunch of thugs, there are more important things to worry about in the world. The articles that gleefully point out all of the military's mistakes, all of the Navy's mistakes. All of those?

He can't deal with them.

He only makes the mistake of reading the comments once, and then he shuts down his reader, shuts his eyes, and forces himself to try and remember the start of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales so he doesn't scream, so he doesn't destroy something, some _one_.

“When that Aprill, with his shoures soote,” Norm says, barely mouthing the words, “The droghte of March hath perced to the roote / And bathed every veyne in swich licour...”

– –

 **to:** “TMC” escolasticademoira @ cibertejido.com  
 **from:** “Norm” onlyslightlyviking @ 7netseas.com  
 **subject:** help me, obi-won

Hey Trudy,

I know I haven't said, well, anything since I sent out that 'hi, I'm alive' email, but you're the only person I can ask this who I don't think will worry too much.

It's normal to be angry enough to visualise killing, say, high-ranking officers. Or journalists and bloggers. Or smashing things. Or, just, I'm...not used to being this angry. The ships I've been on have been shot at before, and I didn't get this angry about it.

I don't know what to do.

\- Norm

 **to:** “Norm” onlyslightlyviking @ 7netseas.com  
 **from:** “TMC” escolasticademoira @ cibertejido.com  
 **subject:** re: help me, obi-won

Heya!

Yeah, I figured you were busy (or high on pain meds), so no big deal! I'm just glad you're alive and mostly okay.

And whoooo, boy, okay. Anger is **completely normal** in post-combat situations, particularly when you lose friends and _particularly_ , I'd say, when you've got nothing else to fill the time with. Now this anger is useful in war and combat and all that jazz, but you're not in a combat-situation, and you _don't_ have your job to distract yourself with. This is where it's not productive. Normal and natural, yes, but _not_ very good for future mental stability.

So while you're still dealing with the VA I'd go and see someone. Think of it as fixing your mind like they are fixing your arm. You need to channel it somewhere or deal with it, and not let it just bubble away in your brain. Trust me, that only lands you in a fuckton of trouble. (along with guilt, and going over what happened and over it and over it. Find yourself doing that, then get thee to a shrink)

This email has to be quick (engineering report! but I really wanted to get back to you ASAP), but seriously, if you need to vent or think things out over email, I'm always going to listen and get back. But if your thoughts are disturbing _you_ that's a clear danger sign, and you need to talk to someone who is actually trained in dealing with that kind of shit, not just me. I'm also here if you need distracting, although again, around my time constraints.

(and it's okay if you can't talk about things without losing it, too. You saw how I reacted in that dino! _Romeo and Juliet_ we saw? I still can't talk about Hel-V without breaking down. So that's perfectly normal, too. Just putting that out there.)

take care,  
Trudy

 

 **to:** “TMC” escolasticademoira @ cibertejido.com  
 **from:** “Norm” onlyslightlyviking @ 7netseas.com  
 **subject:** re: help me, obi-won

short email as my arm is mucking up today (not to mention the fun in typing one-handed), but thank you. I am following your advice. I think it's helping. How do you deal with the responsibility, though? I know the theory, but I'm not sure if it's helping. I just...I keep thinking if I was faster, better, you know the rest.

 **to:** “Norm” onlyslightlyviking @ 7netseas.com  
 **from:** “TMC” escolasticademoira @ cibertejido.com  
 **subject:** re: help me, obi-won

Yeah, I know the rest. Faster, better, quicker, more talented, yadda yadda. It's generally a bunch of BS. Not to say you shouldn't own up to your fuck-ups when they happen, but from all reports, your team did what they could. So, unless you feel like blaming _them_ as much as you blame yourself, it's just guilt talking. And you're not the kind of person to blame _them_ , so you need to go and punch guilt in the face until it cries uncle.

...or however you'd like to phrase that. I'm more violent than you are, so I'm fine with punching. Maybe you could lock it up? Banish it? Speak Latin to it.

As for me, I can't really describe it. I'm still, always, going to feel in some circumstances that I could have done more than I did, no matter how accurate this is. And some things you can't get over, and I guess some things you _shouldn't_ get over, because that makes you a monster (yay, have fun with the advice that contradicts itself!). But mostly, it's just...

Okay. It's that it was (when I was on active duty) and is going to be my job, my career. We're professionals, doing our jobs the best we can, and I have to believe and trust in that. And sometimes it's just not good enough and there isn't anything you can do. It's down to God or Luck or whatever you believe in. An RPG falls through the open hatch of an armoured vehicle, blows it up – nothing you can do about things like that. If you can't accept that, get out (general 'you' there, as you had plans about going to college anyway?)

Mostly, I _can_ accept that. I can accept that I will do my best, but that sometimes Luck isn't with me. And all I can do is remember and try and plan for that next time. And try not to let the guilt eat me up.

Trudy

 **to:** “TMC” escolasticademoira @ cibertejido.com  
 **from:** “Norm” onlyslightlyviking @ 7netseas.com  
 **subject:** re: help me, obi-won

Speak Latin to it, eh? I'll certainly try that.

On a more serious note, thank you, once again.

And you know, the more I think, the more I realise I don't want to be responsible for anyone's life but my own. I don't regret signing up, I don't regret that at all, and I don't regret what I did (in general, anyway).

But I just don't think I have it in me to have people rely on me for their _life_. I don't have that confidence, or the blind faith of youth, or whatever it is that THE military try and keep in us. I did have it, once, but not anymore.

– –

After his second operation on his arm, Norm finds himself sketching. He can't draw like Trudy can; she's an artist, someone who can draw flights of fancy and insight. She sends him a drawing of the pair of them, dressed as an elf (him) and a dwarf (her), the height difference between them exaggerated. He has pointed ears and long hair, and she has an axe hooked through her belt. It's black and white, a scanned-in paper drawing, and it actually makes him laugh briefly when he sees it. But, he can't do things like that.

What he can do is the scientist's sketch, only drawing what he can see or has seen. And he draws the sinking of the USS _Iwo Jima_ , her broken halves bobbing in the water like two towers.

Oddly enough, he feels better once he finishes the sketch, like he's lessened the burn of the memory.

– –

This is what he can't really explain to his parents, to his older sister: The _Iwo Jima_ was killed. She had a soul, the sum of her parts and bolts and engines combining to form a whole like the human body and brain combines to create a person. And like a human, that whole could be broken, shattered.

Drowned.

But his mother the biologist and his father the architect and his sister the lawyer don't – can't – understand, so increasingly he finds himself giving up trying to explain.

Increasingly, he finds himself just letting it go.

– –

When Norm receives the official notice of his discharge, he doesn't know what to do with it. He puts it down on the table, stares at it. Probably only his imagination, but it stares back. He pulls out the forms the VA shrink had given him for getting into college with vet-benefits, and puts them next to his discharge.

Enlightenment does not appear.

“It was just supposed to be a job,” Norm informs the pieces of polymer paper. “Four years, get some interesting experience while I sorted out what I was going to do. It was just supposed to be a job,” he repeats softly, although he doesn't really know why.

“I'm out,” he says after a moment, testing the words.

Retired.

He takes a deep breath, which is somehow easier than it has been for a while.

 _Out_.

If he fucks up now, only person who is going to get hurt is him.

That, Norm decides, feels good. Finally, he sits up, and reaches for the college-aid forms. At least he knows what courses to study, wherever he scores a place; the repeating of linguistic terminology while floating in the Atlantic had decided _that_.

But no computers. No more than everyone else does. No programming.

Not for a long, long time.


	9. Interlude

_October, 2138  
Brown Campus, Rhode Island_

Norm finds Trudy sitting in a corner of the college bar's patio, head tilted back against the wall, finger tapping against her bottle of soda angrily. Her best friend, Mohammed Farzan, is still with her, gesturing as he talks. As they argue.

“Look, Farzan, I'm...fine, okay, just. Fuck off,” she is telling him, and then she catches sight of Norm. Her expression is hard to read, but she gestures him over. “See? I have a friend. Norm, you'll babysit won't you? Make sure I don't kill anyone?” Her words are oddly flat, which only seems to make her bottled-up fury worse.

“I won't babysit,” Norm says, holding his hands up. “I'll keep you company, though.”

“Trudy-” Farzan starts, and then he pinches his nose. “Fine.”

“Good. Go play. Find your fiancee,” Trudy says, and Farzan gives her an exasperated look.

“Just...don't try and start any more fights,” he says, getting to his feet.

“Olsen comes over, I ain't promisin' anythin',” she replies tartly, taking a defiant swig of her bottle. Farzan rolls his eyes, catches Norm's gaze, and nods slightly as he passes by. If Trudy noticed the exchange, she doesn't mention it. Still, when Norm sits next to her, he does so carefully, as if trying to avoid being burned.

They sit in silence for a time, and then Trudy says, “Fuck it.” Just like that, she sounds tired rather than angry, her fury dialed down to a tight unhappiness.

Norm hesitates, and then asks, “What actually happened? I saw you get up in the girl's face, but I couldn't hear anything. Um. If you want to tell me, you don't have to, obviously.”

Farzan had pulled Trudy back, and one of the other USNA cadets had hauled back the blonde girl.

“Olsen. Libby Olsen. Second year cadet. On the soccer team. You know, _obviously_. Been fucking my girlfriend.” Trudy slumps further down on the bench, lets her head hit the back of it. “Stupid bitch.”

Cautiously, “Which one?”

Trudy smirks at that, a little. “Both. I mean, hell, if Shelley had _asked_ , I wouldn't have cared if she had sex with anyone else. I'm pretty easy-going. And busy. I get that. But _Olsen_. You just...you don't do that. You don't fucking fuck around on your team-mate's girl. Or boy. Or whatever. It's trust. I have to trust her. Olsen. Not just on the football pitch, but she's heading for the Marines, too. I have to trust her to have my back, but I can't.” She shakes her head, her eloquent mouth twisting. “They're all such fucking children,” she mutters, taking another drink.

Watching her, he's glad it's only soft drink she's tossing back. “Children?” he asks, although he thinks he knows who she is referring to.

“Children. The other cadets. They have no _fucking_ idea what their oaths mean. I can't stand it sometimes.”

“But you don't talk about it,” he says quietly, “because they'll never get it until they are in those situations.” He swallows, and remembers tasting seawater that tasted like blood. “And yet, you hope they never will have to. Be in those situations, I mean.”

He can hear her breathe in and out, and out of the corner of his eye he sees her nod.

“Yeah. Exactly.” She sighs. “This...wasn't how I'd planned to spend the evening.”

“What, after you completely thrashed us?” His tone is teasing, and she grins at him.

“USNA vs Brown, four-nil, baby. That wasn't a thrashing. That was _easy_.”

“Yeah, yeah, be smug. Just remember that our men's team still beat yours.”

“One-nil. Yeah. Another reason Farzan's pissy tonight.” But her smile fades as her gaze drifts over to the bar-proper, where the rest of her team would be. Where Olsen is, presumably. “Ah, hell with it,” Trudy says and shifts, her head coming to rest against his arm.

This time, the silence is far more comfortable.

“....you have dragons on your boots,” Norm says after a long moment, sounding surprised. It also sounds like an abrupt change of subject, which it is, but it had honestly just struck him then. She laughs.

“Yes, yes I do,” she replies, smugly pointing her left foot like a dancer. Trudy has a red Chinese-style dragon curling around each boot, right one different from the left; when she points her foot, the dragon looks like it's stretching its neck.

“Where the hell did you get them?” he asks, mind running through possible websites.

“A place in Annapolis. One of those stores where they don't even bother showing the price.”

“Ah, if you need to ask the price, you can't afford it?”

“Bingo. Let's just say that I'm glad I've got five years of service rather than student debt, and leave it at that.”

He laughs, shaking his head. “Vanity. Your true vice is finally revealed.”

“Hey,” she says, shoving him slightly with her shoulder. “Not a vice if you only indulge occasionally. 'Sides, who are you to talk, look how long your hair is now. It's in a ponytail. If you had it out, you'd look like a Viking.”

“I...might have meant for that,” Norm allows, slowly and with great dignity.

“A _geeky_ Viking.” Trudy pauses. “Did they even _have_ geeks?”

“Pretty sure they did. Everyone has geeks.”

Trudy scoffs a little, goes back to leaning her head against his arm. “You're okay, Norm,” she says at last.

A little confused, he says, “So are you.”

“Uh-huh. So, why's my girlfriend two-timing me?”

Ah. “Because she's an idiot,” he says, and he means that, as well.

“Yeah, well. Sweet of you to say,” Trudy says, and then asks, tone casual, “So, why aren't I going out with you?”

For a moment that stretches a beat too long, he can't really think of a reason.


	10. The Best Man

_October, 2139  
San Diego County, California_

Norm is lost.

It is partly his own fault. The trouble with attending the wedding of someone in his friendship circle is that other people in that friendship circle tend to be invited. And tend to show up. Which normally he wouldn't mind, given friendship circles are made up of friends, but this time is different: exes always make things complicated.

Particularly exes where he is actually at fault for using her as a rebound relationship, and so he can't simply brush it off as all Simone's fault for the Awkward that has resulted.

Neither can he blame her for the fact that he saw her walking down the corridor, looking annoyed and muttering under her breath, and decided to take the next exit so that she wouldn't see him. And...well, he hadn't reached a conclusion about what would happen if she did. Probably nothing terrible, but he still...

Ran. Fled. Bolted. Other words in several other languages.

So now he is lost in a maze of hotel corridors, with no one to blame but himself, and the hotel managers for managing to make their hotel more confusing than any ship or university that he's had to live in. Pausing for a moment, he tries to get his bearings, fails, and picks a random corner to turn around.

He only just manages to avoid colliding with Trudy.

This does not really help with getting his mental bearings because he always, always, _always_ forgets how vibrant she is in person.

And short.

He always ends up forgetting the short bit, as if she grows bigger in his mind's eye. But, no, Trudy ever remains herself; short and vibrant and strikingly attractive. And, more importantly, currently staring at him with narrowed eyes.

“Spellman. The hell you doing back here?”

“I...uh. I got lost.” he manages, giving himself a quick mental shake. She's wearing her dress blues, complete with the brightly coloured military ribbons of service, a couple medals (the Purple Heart is the one his eye is first drawn to), and a-

Norm blinks. “You have a sword,” he says.

“Of course I have a sword.”

“ _I_ didn't know you had a sword.”

Trudy regards him with slightly raised eyebrows. “I'm a commissioned officer of the United States Marine Corps. Of course I've got a sword. It's _traditional_.”

“Yeah, but. It's a _sword_.”

Her face cracks into a grin. “Cool, ain't it?”

“Can you use it?” As soon he says that, he flushes. Possibly not the right question to ask. Fortunately, she nods, beaming.

“Absolutely. Wouldn't have a weapon I didn't know how to use.” Trudy draws the sword from its sheath and shifts her feet. “ _En guard_ ,” she says once she's in the position. He thinks she should look ridiculous, standing _en guard_ in a hotel corridor with a curved sword and her dress blues. Particularly with her jacket unbuttoned, short hair tousled. But she doesn't. She looks...focused. Yes, focused, even with that hint of a smile around her mouth. Focused and competent and some odd state that combines alert with being entirely at home.

Norm wants to take a picture of her like that, but he's never been any good with cameras. He'll just have to settle for using his memory.

“That,” he says, “is awesome.”

“Damn straight it is,” Trudy says, and extends her arm so that the sword is much, much closer to his throat. “Now, you need to go and take your seat in the wedding room so I have one less cat to herd.”

“...The blade actually looks sharp.”

“'Course it's sharp. I'm the best man. My threats of beheading need to be backed up. No comments on the beheadabilty of a sabre.”

“Not commenting. How do I get unlost?”

“Go back down the hallway, take a left, keep taking lefts until you reach the big room with all the staircases. Cross the floor and go up the staircase that swoops around, and follow the signs. And the flowers. There are like a million freaking flowers. Now get.”

Norm straightens, and snaps her a sharp salute which makes her laugh. “Yes, ma'am,” he says, and goes to do what the good officer ordered.

– –

Lieutenant Mohammed Farzan (United States Marine Corps) and Lieutenant Anjali Kapoor (US Air Force) were married with full military honours, up to and including the bride, looking dashing in her own very new uniform, getting swatted on the ass with a sabre once she and her very new husband had walked out from under the sword arch.

Tradition, after all, doesn't have to be formal.

Neither do parties, no matter that a large number of the guests are in dress uniform. Mixed in are tuxedos (his own is rented), evening dresses, headscarves, and saris. It makes an interesting crowd, but one he is observing from a table on the outer edge of the reception room.

"Norm. Hi," Anjali says, grabbing the chair next to him and flopping in it with a jangle of bracelets.

"Hey yourself. So you ended up in a sari anyway."

"Mmmhmm," she says, her dimpled smile mischievous. "It's a compromise - I got to wear my dress uniform when I said 'I do' if I wore the sari for the rest of the night. And given my parents own the hotel..." She rolls her eyes, and then beams at him. Normally, she's cute: round-faced, hawk-nosed, and cute. But right now, she's radiant, and he grins back at her.

"It's a pretty swanky place. I can see the logic in caving."

"Yeah, yeah. Ok, before I forget, and before all the embarrassing speeches, I just want to say...thank you."

"'Thank you'? For what?"

"For dragging me out of the library to that stupid post soccer game party. Because, if you hadn't, I wouldn't have ever met Farzan. And I wouldn't be here getting married to him, and just..." she leans over and hugs him tight. "Thank you."

"You're very welcome," he tells her solemnly, which earns him a jab in the arm.

"Just for that, I'm dragging you to meet my C.O."

"Any...particular reason?"

"You're avoiding everyone in uniform, except for Trudy. I've noticed. Also you're avoiding Simone, which is stupid of you, but I can't fix that."

"Shouldn't you be making out with your husband?"

Her hands flutter and her smile goes from glowing like a lamp to burning like the sun. "I can multitask," she manages around her grin. "And this is my damn party, and everyone is going to enjoy themselves. And Van Allen's like you, she's all Pandora-y. So, up, you're being dragged."

Van Allen turns out to be a red-haired woman of indeterminate ethnicity, and a decided air of intensity; Norm has to resist the urge to straighten up and salute. He doesn't _quite_ manage to repress the 'ma'ams', though.

De-militarising oneself apparently takes a while.

– –

Like all weddings, there had been food, and speeches, and alcohol, and dancing; hours later, Norm ducks out of the room to try and find some quiet. What he finds is a courtyard garden, the lights dimmed so they won't reflect against the glass roof (or, at least, not reflect _much_.)

The stillness of the courtyard is such a welcome change from the crowded, noisy reception that the sudden, “hey there,” takes him by surprise.

“Trudy. Hi.”

She chuckles. “Sorry. Didn't mean to scare ya.”

“Sure.”

“Much,” she adds, and Norm can see the flash of teeth that marks her trademark grin.

“Sitting on the steps like that, I'm surprised you don't have a pile of bodies at your feet.”

“Everyone else,” Trudy says with _great_ dignity, “is too drunk to go cavorting about the hotel.”

He laughs softly and goes to sit next to her.

“Mind the sword,” she says, moving the hilt to try and get it out of the way.

“You're still wearing it.”

“It gets suspiciously comfortable. Starting to think I was a pirate or something in another life.”

“You'd make a good pirate.”

“Yeah?”

“Swashbuckling with a dramatic coat and kickass boots. And a hat. Sticking it to the man and causing havoc to the Dutch West India Company. I can picture it.”

Trudy snorts. “Sure you're not just picturin' what the pirate-wench bodice would do to my boobs?”

“Well, maybe,” he allows, and gets her cackle of a laugh. “Captain Chacon, of the Good Pirate Ship...”

“Oh, shit. Right. Name. Cori Ocllo.”

“...who?”

“Cori Ocllo. Inka mythological type. I like her. She did stuff. Was really clever. Also, you know, go female solidarity.”

“She did stuff.” Norm looks at her. “Trudy, how drunk are you?” He distinctly remembers a promise to never drink again, and until tonight, she seemed to be keeping it.

She thinks about that for a moment. “A bit,” she says, slowly. “Yes. A bit drunk. But I'm _Captain_ , savvy?”

“Savvy,” he says, attempting to keep a straight face against the sudden grin at her words. Trudy doesn't appear to notice either the almost-grin or the concern surrounding it.

“On the _other_ hand,” she muses, “the Inka were imperialist bastards, and that doesn't seem like a good feel to bring to a _pirate_ ship, you know?”

“Have any other suggestions?”

“Not off-hand, no.”

“Cori Ocllo it is, then,” he says, stumbling only slightly on the 'Ocllo'.

“I can live with this,” she says, leaning back with her elbows on the landing. She crosses her feet at the ankles, and tilts her head back.

“You look smug.”

“I,” she says, slow and dramatic, “got my best friend in the whole wide world married today, to a very nice girl who adores him. It went off mostly without a hitch, and I managed to get the mothers-in-law to save their catfight until _after_ the bride and groom had departed. And trust me, that took _work_ , Spellman. Work. Time and effort and pain and _work_. So I? Am pretty damn pleased with myself right now.”

Norm laughs. “Yeah, Ann mentioned she was worried about her mom flipping out.”

“Bigoted bitch,” Trudy mutters. “Can't have her precious baby marrying some working-class, monotheist Persian boy, oh no.”

“...I'm impressed you managed to say that without a noticeable pause.”

She chuckles. “Might've been sayin' it a lot over the past few months. WCMPB is what it got shortened to over email.” She lifts her head to look at him. “You know what I realised? If I'm ever stupid enough to get hitched, I know exactly how I'm doing it.”

“Oh?”

“I'm taking future spouse down to the registry with a couple witnesses. And I'll wear a nice yellow sundress. And if we get real excited, we'll invite a _small_ number of family and friends to a restaurant that night to celebrate.”

“So, the complete opposite of...this.”

“Got it in one.” Trudy pauses. “On second thought, Mom'd kill me. Better avoid the whole question.” He's looking at her, so he catches the way her lips curve ruefully. “Not that it'd be hard right now.”

“I didn't know you-” Norm falters as she raises an eyebrow at him. “I thought you weren't looking.”

“I'm not. Particularly after the Shelley Saga. And Selma. It's just....the cat can't give back-rubs.”

Offering her one would probably be a bad idea, given relief from tension and knots would result in quasi-erotic groaning. So, he is sensible, and doesn't. “Shelley, Selma...Sveta dumped me for a scholarship on the Moon...”

“You're avoiding Simone...”

“Why is everyone mentioning that?”

“Because you're being an idiot.” Her tone is fond; it doesn't quite take the sting away from her words. “But I get your point,” she continues. “We have terrible taste in women.”

Norm ducks his head a little, cracks a smile. “Maybe it's just the letter S. No more dating people whose name starts with S.”

“First name or last name?” There is an odd note to Trudy's suddenly clear voice, and when he glances at her, she's sitting up instead of lounging back. It makes him abruptly aware of how close they are.

“Uh. First, I guess.”

“Good,” she says, eyes intent on him. “I can live with that.”

It wouldn't take much to lean in and kiss her, it really wouldn't. Of course, then she'd probably punch him. Or smile that crooked smirk of hers and laugh with the joke. Only, it wouldn't be a joke. But still, he can't help the, “...why?” that slips out.

Her expression shifts from focused to incredulous. “You really are an idiot, Spellman,” she says after a too-long moment. Before he can ask for clarification, Trudy grabs the lapel of his jacket, leans forward, and kisses him.

His first thought is: _how the hell was I supposed work **this** out?_

His second thought isn't coherent, because Trudy is kissing him for the first time in five years, and he's been wanting this more than he really should. But she's kissing him, and her mouth is hotter and sweeter than he remembered, and he kisses her back.

His _third_ thought is that she tastes sweet partly because of the cocktails she'd presumably been drinking. And that her words had been overly precise, and that she's... drunk.

 _Damn_.

Norm brings a hand up to her arm, and twists his mouth out of range. She makes a faint whimper of protest, and says, “Norm....”

“You're drunk.” His tone is shorter than he meant it to be, and Trudy flinches back.

“I'm. Not _that_ drunk.”

“Yeeeeeah,” Norm says slowly. “You are. You don't....normally go around kissing me.”

“For fuck's sake,” she snaps, hurt transforming into anger. “Maybe I like you?”

His heart twists at that, all pleasure enough to hurt. But what he says is, “Can we have this conversation when you're sober?”

“Why? You'll just be all...sensible and shit.”

“What's sensib- No,” Norm corrects himself. “Tomorrow.”

Trudy jabs her finger into his chest, hard enough that he winces. “Sensible. And dealing with my shit is fine over the 'net, but you don't want the rest of it. And I'm not quitting. Okay?”

He hasn't got the faintest idea what she is talking about, and the abrupt shift in her mood is leaving him tense and unbalanced. “Okay.”

She's glaring at him, mouth tight, and Norm resists the urge to glare at her back in self-defence.

“How drunk are you? Really?” he asks again, no longer amused.

Trudy doesn't reply for a moment. “I'm fine, okay?”

“Can you walk?”

She rolls her eyes. “Haven't tried yet.”

Norm nods slowly, watching her carefully. “Want me to help you to your room?” he asks, and braces himself for the argument he's sure is going to follow.

– –

By the time they get to the floor her room is on, Trudy's apologising.

Over, and over, and over again.

It's better than the anger, makes more sense than the kissing, and by the way she's clinging to him and stumbling over her feet, he's glad he stood his ground and didn't leave her by herself.

But Jesus Christ on a pogo-stick.

Fortunately, the woman Trudy is rooming with opens the door after Trudy loudly fumbles with the swipe-card and handle. Perhaps even more fortunately, the blonde has good reflexes, and manages to keep Trudy from spilling over onto the tiles.

“Whoa, okay, Chacon,” she says, eyes going from Trudy to Norm, who is rubbing his hip where Trudy's sword hit him. “I thought you said you weren't going to drink again?”

“Fuck off,” Trudy mutters. “I'm the best man, I'm allowed to drunk.”

Both Norm and the blonde opt for diplomatic silence at that.

“So, I can leave her with you?” Norm asks, trying and entirely failing to recall the woman's name.

She nods. “Nothing I haven't done before. Thanks, too, for making sure she didn't get into trouble.”

“Jesus, Augustinia, you make me sound like a lost puppy,” Trudy says crossly, the effect somewhat lost given she's now sitting on a bed with her head in her hands.

“Uh-uh-uh, it's Elwood, Chacon,” says Elwood the blonde. “El. Wood. Elwood. You do not have the clearance for anything else.”

Trudy flips her off.

 _Augustinia?_ Norm thinks about asking, and then catches a glare from Elwood. He keeps his mouth shut.

“Right,” Elwood says. “Mister...”

“Norm. Uh, Spellman.”

“Sure. Norm. Thank you for retrieving the good lieutenant, but I'll take it from here.”

“Yeah, uh...of course. Trudy, I'll....Talk to you tomorrow, okay?” She doesn't answer, and so Norm retreats back into the hallway.

It's only when he's just pressed the button to take him to his floor that he realises that the rather athletic Elwood had been wearing nothing but trousers and a bra. What it says about his state of mind that it's taken him so long to work out, he really doesn't want to contemplate right now. Tomorrow. That's when he'll sit down and sort out his head.

Norm glances at his watch.

In the morning, then.

Another glance to double-check the time.

 _Later_ in the morning.

– –

Trudy's not in the dining hall by the time he comes down later that morning, and he's not really surprised. He can't, however, tell if he's relieved or disappointed. Given the mild hangover, and the way the bones in his once-shattered arm are aching, he might go with relieved.

The dining hall itself is mostly quiet. He's missed the early morning rush of tourists, and now it's mostly other guests at the wedding, nursing hangovers and not enough sleep. Which suits him just fine, as it gives him the space to think-

“So! I was thinking,” Simone announces as she lightly drops into the chair opposite him. “Oops, sorry, didn't mean to make you jump!”

“...what?” Norm manages after a moment, staring as his brain quickly recalibrates. It's a little hard, as Simone is a jarring burst of colour and overly cheerful noise against the delicate state of his post-party senses.

She blinks at him, glittered eyelids exaggerating the movement. “Maybe I should wait until you've finished caffeinating yourself.”

“Might be a good idea.” The quiet lasts for maybe twenty seconds. “What were you thinking about?”

Simone gives him a strange look. “You know, the conference that starts tomorrow?”

“...ah. Yes, that.”

“....what did _you_ think I was thinking about?”

He searches her face, but all he finds is genuine confusion. “Never mind,” he says at last, feeling foolish.

“Okay,” she says, slowly. “Right, then, as I was saying, I got the email with the new order that all the papers are going to be held in...”

Simone, brilliant though she is, does get fixated on things that are of immediate interest to her. Right now, that's the politics of academia and anthropology, which he really should start paying more attention to anyway.

And given that Simone seems to be ignoring last night’s behaviour – if indeed she noticed – he'll... just go with it.

Once the coffee starts to kick in.

– –

By the time two o'clock rolls around, Norm's fully packed and sitting in the hotel's foyer, checking email on his phone and double-checking tram times. Right when he’s just about decided that the only way this county’s tram system makes any sense is if a demon was involved in the construction, to maximise the corruption of souls due to commuter frustration, his chair gets kicked.

“Yo, Spellman,” Trudy says.

“Trudy, hey, I wasn't sure if you, if I was going to catch you,” he says, scanning her face. She looks tired, a bit subdued, but otherwise seems okay. A bit pale, maybe, but that could also be her black jacket.

Black leather jacket, black pants, a motorbike helmet under her arm, overnight bag in her hand and a long, slim case as if to house a sword slung over her back. He feels himself smile, a little wry. “You heading off?” he asks, and she nods.

“Yeah, it's gonna start pissing down with rain soon, I'd rather be home by the time it hits. I'm too tired to be comfortable ridin' in the wet,” she says, and her weight shifts from one foot to the other. “You, uh. Look, I'm sorry I didn't emerge until now, I did– I mean, you did say you wanted to talk.”

“I did. And, I do.”

“Could you forget about it?” Trudy asks quietly. “Me kissing you, and what I said. Could we just forget I did that? You know, I was drunk and you were, uh.”

“I can't,” Norm says.

“You....can't. Look, I know you can't physically delete memory, but-”

“I don't want to,” he interrupts. Trudy frowns at him, then flashes a quick, involuntary grin before biting down her lip. She rubs at her mouth, and finally her expression settles to being tired.

“Then....yeah, we need to talk. But hell if I can think it right now. Plus, you know-”

“Yeah, I know. “ He briefly holds up his lower arm. “Rain.”

“Still bothers you? Your arm?” she asks, looking concerned.

“Ye-ep. Will for a while, if not....well, always.” Norm shrugs. “I still got my arm, so I can't complain.”

Trudy snorts at that. “Yeah, I guess. I, uh. Send me a message once you're done conferencing, okay? And...you can come over to my place, and we'll talk. If you don't mind cats, that is.”

He smiles at her. “I don't mind cats.”

“Good, 'cause Griz ain't going anywhere,” she says, and grins at him. “I should be off. So....good luck with the academics. Hope it goes well.”

“Yeah, thanks. Um, take care on the roads.”

“Aw, where's the fun in that?” She grins, then hesitates. Normally, she'd step close and hug a goodbye; now, she just nods slightly, as if to herself, and steps back. “Catch you then.”

“See you,” he says, and watches her saunter out. Saunter, swagger; she's already moving more like a fighter pilot. The confidence suits her, but the ache in his arm is a reminder of what fighter pilots actually _do_.

Norm turns the screen of his phone off, and leans back in the chair with a long sigh. This, whatever 'this' is, could be a very bad idea. But they hadn't talked it out yet and Trudy was right, they need to. So, he needs to stop worrying about 'this' now and concentrate on the conference.

His fellow anthropological students could feel free to turn up _any minute now_ and help him concentrate, because otherwise he is going to sit here and remember just what it felt like to have Trudy kiss him again.

It takes Simone and Mac another ten minutes.

“Fuck,” Mac says. “Sorry, sorry, I lost the power cord for my comp, and just,” he runs a hand through his spiky hair. “Wow. Yeah. We miss the tram?”

“There's another one in ten minutes,” Norm says, and then stops to think about the time. “Make that five.”

“...we can totally run and make it, right?” Simone says, and Norm grins at her, quite forgetting that he's being awkward around her.

“No harm in trying.”

“...I hate you guys,” Mac mutters, but when they leave the hotel doors and put on their filter-masks, he's right on their heels as they run down the street.


End file.
